


What became of all your gifts, Covenant of this brokered peace unmade

by LittleRedCosette



Series: Your daughters shall be soldiers, Your sons their patron saints [5]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Aftermath, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Character Death, Deaf Clint Barton, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, Graphic Description, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Not Canon Compliant, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2019-09-23
Packaged: 2020-10-26 19:51:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20747807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LittleRedCosette/pseuds/LittleRedCosette
Summary: When Steve looks back, he sees Clint Barton. Clint, with his eyes big, with his fists clenched, staring stoic out of his kitchen window and saying,That guy outside right now,while Bucky stands bare shouldered in the sun.





	What became of all your gifts, Covenant of this brokered peace unmade

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文-普通话 國語 available: [【授翻】赐以庇佑，破于誓言](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22084798) by [Carmen_Shing](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Carmen_Shing/pseuds/Carmen_Shing)

> Friends,
> 
> Your amazing comments and kudos for this series have really moved me, and I thank you for all of them.
> 
> We are past the halfway point in this series now for sure. I have four more mapped out, and then I think that's it. We'll see how it goes, I guess.
> 
> **Please heed the tags.** There is what I can only really say is, for me at least, canon-level reference to suicide, but it's still real and should be taken seriously. There are also some quite graphic descriptions/discussions of incidents previously mentioned in the series.
> 
> **I have also completely danced away from canon, now. There's no going back and I hope that's OK with you all.** The ideas presented here are ones that have occupied me right from the start of this series, and prior to posting it. They will be explored in more detail in a later story, as you'll come to understand. I think this answers some of people's questions (_rablacksun_ you have definitely voiced some big ones...) but also leaves a few hanging.
> 
> It would be lovely to hear from you! Thanks so much again for sticking with me, all of you.
> 
> This is not the end(game).
> 
> Faithfully,  
LRCx

*

There was a fragment of a moment, in 1945, when Steve Rogers clung to the side of a train.

The cold battering at his fingers and his cheeks, perishing and isolated. His heart, carved out of his chest and thrown down into the pit of the Alps. He heard his teeth breaking in his gums, blood in his nose and if he made any sound in that fragment of a moment, it was swallowed up by the greedy wind rushing all about him, stinging his skin.

It was a fragment of a moment, an instant and an age, during which he was the only person in the world who knew that Bucky Barnes was dead. And for that fragment, that instant and that age, one thing remained perfectly clear to Steve.

If he let go, right then. If he loosened his grip and let gravity do her duty, let nature pay her bills.

Well.

Nobody would know, would they?

It would’ve become only another mystery in this big, terrible, mysterious world.

_What happened to Barnes and Rogers?_ The papers might ask, frontline news for a day, replaced tomorrow. The legends of comics undone, immortal and painted. They would never know.

Steve can still taste the snow, pure and clean; the dirty oil of the train and the chips of teeth broken inside his mouth.

Later, Dum Dum had to pull two out proper, and he didn’t feel a thing.

Just absence. Bucky’s, and his own.

Bucky. A hand upon his shoulder, a bloody grimace in the dark. _Barnes, James Buchanan. Sergeant. 32557038. _The last word in his mouth Steve’s name, a torment in Steve’s mind, the gouged skin of his palms under his fingernails.

For just that fragment, they were both alive, and they were both dead.

Steve didn’t let go. Didn’t jump down into the icy hell below. Didn’t follow, broke an oath, forged another. _End of the line, _he had promised, not realising he wouldn’t make it all the way down those frozen tracks, not knowing it wouldn’t be his choice.

Steve didn’t jump, then, but the ice found him anyway.

*

Steve drowned with Peggy Carter’s voice in his ears. One hand clutched around her picture, the other holding nothing at all.

*

The next time something like that happens, it’s not so much a fragment as it is _hours._

Thirty hours and twenty-seven minutes, to be precise.

Thirty hours and twenty-seven minutes during which they are both alive, and they are both dead, only, it’s not Bucky this time, with Steve’s name in his mouth. It’s not Bucky.

*

“Lying _fuck,” _the man rages as he crashes into the room.

Long strides, fast hands. Steve flinches into his restraints and metal kisses the nerves in his elbows, the tendons of his throat. He does not pay heed to the gashes they tear into him, the spasm of his limbs recovering even as they open up.

Whatever Clint spits back, it’s not in English.

It’s not any language at all when a hand buries itself in the thatch of his hair, a strangled outcry of vowels and consonants. It’s a sound and a rage and a spark. _Steve. Steve. Don’t. Steve._

The knife, sharp, wicked, too hungry a mere tool in the hands of malice, and when the blade meets his temple Clint’s entire body arches, bowed like his own weapon. Steve hears his knees snap, hears the cracking of his forearms under siege as he bends against the onslaught of his unyielding restraints, bends until his fragile body breaks.

The knife drags, a slash of crimson, merciless and bloody.

Hawkeye. Blind agony. The pitch of his scream, as sharp as train wheels on an icy track.

*

“Are you saying it’s my fault?” Steve asks.

“You’re damn right I am,” Tony replies.

Between them, Sam’s protests break away to sounds.

*

Six days after the end. After they win the fight but somehow still _lose, _after Thor goes for the head but they’re three weeks too late.

Six days after, Steve returns to Brooklyn. To a familiar neighbourhood, a familiar building, a familiar apartment. Answers a bygones-be message that hadn’t been meant for him, but he found anyway, listened to, precious, clinging.

He climbs the stairs wearily, each step a tug in his muscles, until he’s inside.

Before he can fully realise the front door hadn’t even been locked, he’s bowled into, almost _over, _by a huge bundle of thatched, moulting gold. Warm, wriggling, adoring.

_“Luh,” _is all he manages, his face buried in the dog’s scruff as his knees hit the floor.

Lucky, his body vibrating with energy, his fur soft and his ears perked eager. The dog, the goddamn gorgeous dog.

Steve opens his eyes and recognises the woman standing in front of the window, though it’s been years.

_Katie’s a stray, _Clint had said. She looks it, now. Somehow younger than half a decade ago. Her blonde hair is limp around her face, tucked back by slider grips on both sides. A nasty scar on her chin that wasn’t there before.

Kate, she’d introduced herself as, five years ago, so that’s what Steve calls her.

“Captain America,” she replies.

It sounds ugly, coming from her mouth. Sounds like an insult. Steve thinks idly how she’d probably get on well with Tony.

“How are you?” he asks instead of voicing that.

No good comes from self-pity.

It occurs to him, for the first time in a year and a half, that he doesn’t know if anybody ever told her about Clint. If she just assumed it, from his absence. Or if, even, she’s waiting here for him now.

“Did Widow survive the vanishing?” Kate asks, and Steve finds his concerns answered.

For a moment, her words are meaningless. Then: “Yes. She’s alive.”

Kate nods, affirmative, brave. Lucky pushes his nose into Steve’s throat and he smiles despite himself. The dog must be getting on in age, has to be over ten years old by now.

How long to retrievers live, anyhow? He’s not sure, not sure of anything anymore.

“Kate –” Steve begins and ends, halted by her hands raised to motion for silence.

A good thing, really. He has no idea what would have come out of his mouth otherwise.

“There’s nothing to be said, Captain.”

That title, hard, like dirt on her tongue she wants clean of. It’s never sounded so disrespectful before, but right now, he feels ashamed to hear it bestowed by this angry, heartbroken woman. This woman, who called Clint _Agent Asshole _behind his back, yet looked at him like he was all the light she’d ever need to guide her way.

“Will you take care of Lucky?”

Steve blinks, unable to comprehend her question, even with his arms wrapped around the dog’s bulk.

“What?”

Kate bends down, picking up a rucksack and a case, and Steve’s hit with terrible déjà vu. It feels as if he could glance to the kitchen right now and Clint would be there, cooking barefoot with his hearing aids in his pockets, clacking crockery like it’s personally offended him.

“I need to go,” Kate says in a voice that sounds like the wet of tears only her eyes are dry, determined. “I can’t take him with me. Even if I could – he’s not a puppy anymore. He’ll be good to you.”

It sounds more like she’s trying to convince herself than Steve, really.

She hefts her rucksack over her shoulder, bends down just enough to kiss the flat of Lucky’s head, so close to Steve he can almost hear her heartbeat.

“Take care of yourself, Captain America.”

Steve can’t begrudge her anger, or the restlessness of her feet.

He doesn’t watch her leave, the way he did last time. He watches Lucky instead, feels exhaustion in his bones as the goddamn gorgeous dog smiles up at him, tongue lolling, tail flapping.

He wonders if she knew he would come here, or if she’d been hoping Natasha would and is simply making do. He wonders what she’d have done if nobody had come at all.

Lucky yips quietly, and Steve kisses his snout.

“Hey, boy,” he says, soft as the body warm gold threading around his fingers. “You want to come home with me? We can go see Natasha.”

It’s entirely possible Lucky perks up even more at her name. Steve doesn’t blame him. It’s been a long time since he’ll have seen her, maybe two years or more, but he knows her, always will. They’ve got that much in common.

When he lets go, Lucky trots a circuit of the apartment, snuffling his way to the master bedroom door, where he sits obediently, tail thumping on the carpet.

Steve feels something smarting in the hollow of his chest. From his knees, he shakes his head. Even if Lucky could understand, he doesn’t think he has the words. He didn’t have them a week ago, when Thor asked. He doesn’t have them now, for this goddamn gorgeous dog.

“No, Lucky,” he says thickly. “He’s not coming back.”

Maybe Lucky does understand, or maybe he simply senses the grief wrapping Steve up like a hurricane because he scampers back, tongue out, kissing his hands and face.

Steve hugs him tight, sitting more solidly on the floor to clutch the golden retriever tight to his chest.

Lucky doesn’t complain.

*

There are a thousand starting points to every story, every moment.

Brooklyn, sweltering and shivering. Sarah Rogers’ voice carrying on the wing of her prayers, her son’s heart pressing valiantly against his ribcage, bursting with love for her.

New Jersey, England, Austria. Sheltered and secretive. Howard Stark’s bright-eyed admiration for himself and for all those around him who dare to dream his dreams; the warmth of his hand clasping the back of a young man’s neck in solidarity. Trenches in the sky and a bomber plane in the ocean.

Peggy. Her voice, her hands. The bounce of her hair when she walked and the scent of her perfume as she turned away.

The cling of the ice, and the breathless release of it.

It begins a thousand times, and yet.

And yet.

When Steve looks back. When he stands on the brink of the end of the world, the collapse of everything he knows for sure to be true in this hopeforsaken half of a universe.

When he looks back, he sees not the bang, but the whimper, just like T. S. Eliot promised.

*

When Steve looks back, he sees Clint Barton. Clint, with his eyes big, with his fists clenched, staring stoic out of his kitchen window and saying, _That guy outside right now, _while Bucky stands bare shouldered in the sun.

*

Before all that, though. Before.

*

In the wake of Ultron’s defeat, a strange, unshakeable stillness takes hold of the Avengers Base.

It’s a dominating force, a kind of exhaustion that Steve hasn’t known since the worst winters of the twenties. 1925, when he brushed fingers with death, and his skin was blue, and the effort of his heart and lungs stole every other slice of energy from his heaving body. There’s nothing Steve fears more than helplessness.

It’s a little like that, after Ultron.

Thor leaves in search of answers, which can Steve can respect, perhaps even envy in his own way. It would be nice to take off on a solo mission, just for a while.

He can’t.

Sam’s finally agreed to sign up properly onto the team, if only so he can bully a better answer out of Steve as to why he’s been called off Bucky’s tail than _He’s safe, I know he’s safe. _Not to mention Wanda, who had seemed to believe him when he said coming to join the Avengers was only one of multiple options, yet she’d regarded the base with treacherous suspicion all the same upon arrival.

And Vision. Vision, who remains a mystery, miracle or not.

Tony’s working double time to come up with answers more reassuring than _Magic Stone Makes Sentience, _though with Bruce in the wind it seems he’s just as keen for a project as he’s ever been in his life. Work has always been a Stark’s best form of procrastination.

Natasha and Clint have split the welcome party between them with the same pragmatic efficiency they do everything when tasked as a pair. Natasha is commandeering almost as much of Vision’s time as Tony is, and seems to be the only person on the team who isn’t thrown off guard by the fact talking to Vision mostly feels like one last kick of a reminder that JARVIS isn’t here anymore.

(Steve hasn’t yet found the words to apologise to Tony, for not giving that loss the attention it deserved at the time. It’s a delicate business, apologising to Tony Stark. He’s as likely to take it as cruelty as he is kindness.)

Natasha’s even pretending she can’t lap Sam when they go for a run together, and the smarmy look on Sam’s face is going to be really worth it when Steve spills the beans on her game.

Clint, meanwhile, holds the winning streak as the only Avenger not yet to find themselves banished from Wanda’s proximity at least once, a fact that surprises nobody but Clint himself.

On the other hand, Clint also hasn’t been in the same room as Vision since they landed at the base ten days ago.

It takes Steve entirely too long to notice, but once he has, it takes no time at all to figure out why.

By the time Steve tracks him down, that night, it’s long gone midnight.

Clint’s lying on a sofa, feet buried in the cushions and his palms resting over his eyes like he’s holding his head together by sheer will alone.

When Steve approaches, he lifts his feet just high enough for Steve to slide in underneath them, taking hold of his ankles to pull them into his lap. It’s comfortable, an almost non-weight he can grip, and has the added bonus of meaning it will be harder for Clint to run away when he inevitably decides he doesn’t want to answer Steve’s questions.

The living space is otherwise empty. Just a reclining Hawkeye and two reading lamps lit on the other side of the room.

They share the silence as easily as they always do, and it occurs to Steve that this is the first time he’s been alone with Clint since the bunker at the farm.

Not that they’re necessarily _alone, _as it were. Tony’s not been terribly forthcoming about how far along he is with programming FRIDAY into the mainframe of the base, so it’s better to assume she is present and can hear them.

Demanding desperation is burning low and constant in Steve’s chest.

With the matter of Ultron out of the way, and the settling of the newest Avengers going as well as can be hoped for, it’s only a matter of time before Clint takes off again. Only, this time, Steve will know where he’s going, and why.

He’ll know _who for._

It’s a torturous excitement, remembering the loose smile on Bucky’s face over that video feed. His voice over the phone, a little hesitant, but _there, _full of Brooklyn vowels and concealed in a mess of inflections that have littered Steve’s dreams ever since he woke up from the ice.

Before Steve can even begin to figure out a cryptic way of communicating any of his wants or worries, Clint finally removes his hands from his face, revealing bloodshot tiredness and a hard expression that jars some of Steve’s warm thrill.

Raising his hands clearly in front of him, Clint signs, slower than he does for Natasha,

_My brother is dead._

It’s partly just Steve’s natural hesitation with ASL, which he’s never felt well-practiced at no matter how patient Clint is with him, and it’s partly the incongruity of the statement, but it takes a moment for that to reach Steve properly. When it does, he feels a frown tug over his brow as he responds, fingers brushing his chest and his forehead instinctively.

_I know._

He knew first because it was there in Hawkeye’s file, along with details of his marksmanship and kill record and grade three hearing impairment.

He knew second because Clint told him.

He knew third because Natasha told him how.

_I hated him, _Clint adds, which was also mentioned somewhere amidst the rest of the little Steve knows about Barney Barton, along with how he used to wedge himself between his little brother and their dad’s fists more often than not, and how he gave Clint the untidy scar that runs parallel under his left clavicle.

_I know, _Steve repeats, though it seems unnecessary because Clint has more attention on his own hands than Steve’s.

Clint lets out a loud, impatient sigh through his nose, looking grumpier than before.

Steve glances up, towards the corridor that leads to Wanda’s room, which Clint has spent more time in than out of, recently.

So far, it seems Clint and Wanda have been trading lessons in ASL and Sokovian. Steve’s mostly left them to it.

He’s starting to think that was a bad call.

He taps Clint’s ankle to re-grab his attention and signs, carefully,

_Do you miss him?_

Clint scowls immediately, but it only lasts a moment before the fights drops out of him like stones into water, leaving ripples behind that rock and change.

_Sometimes. I don’t know. I think I wish I did._

Steve nods, because that makes a morbid sort of sense.

He doesn’t know what that feels like. There are people Steve misses desperately and people he misses distantly. There are people he doesn’t miss at all and there are people he wishes he didn’t miss half as much as he does. But he’s never had the misfortune of feeling obliged to miss somebody and not succeeding. He’s grateful, because it sounds like a tricky demon to exorcise.

Steve smiles at Clint, and rubs his ankles, and waits for him to say what’s really on his mind.

It’s one of those things that Tony and Clint have in common, Steve has come to realise. They’ll get there, eventually. It’s just a matter of waiting long enough – through Tony’s chatter, and through Clint’s silence. With time, they’ll say what they really mean.

And, true to form, once almost four minutes of absolute silence have passed, Clint lets out another loud, pointed breath and lifts his hands, signing almost too quickly for Steve to follow,

_I am the worst therapist in the world._

This seems mostly untrue, and more than a little absurd.

In fact, the only person who’s done a better job of helping Steve get through the worst of his issues in the past three years has been Alma Ricci, and seeing how she’s an actual qualified therapist, it’s a bit unfair to measure them against one another.

Clint is good at helping people, probably for all the reasons he thinks he’s not.

Steve refrains, just barely, from simply throwing out a blanket rejection of the statement. Instead he looks at Clint, lying on his back with his eyes rubbed pink, breathing shallow through his taped up ribs that he’d only let someone see to once Wanda was asleep in a safe, non-Medical bed. He’s glaring at the ceiling like it’s a personal affront and biting the corners of his mouth.

When Steve taps his ankle again, Clint looks at him, eyes bright and full of defences.

Steve formulates the words carefully, wraps them around his fingers as tightly as he can, and means them so hard he mouths along as he signs,

_I can think of four people who would fight you on that._

Clint frowns, and it’s clear as day on his face that he’d like to ask, that he’s trying to count them out, refusing to cave to his own curiosity. So, Steve signs, first in their easy shorthand,

_Me. Natasha. Lucky._

Clint’s lips twitch reluctantly, eyes gravitating from Steve’s hands to his mouth and back again. In the streaking gold light of the reading lamps across the room, half his face is a bruise of longing.

Steve adds, small enough to hide most of his movements in case of cameras, very cautiously, very gratefully,

_B-U-C-K-Y._

Clint’s gaze snaps up to Steve’s, awash with too many responses for Steve to identify them. Fear, maybe, and hope; questions. Anger and confusion and pride. Perhaps he thinks Steve’s making fun of him, but that would be awfully unfair because Steve’s made some mistakes in his time, but he’s never in his life made fun of another person out of cruelty, certainly not a friend, certainly not this man right here.

Steve keeps his expression calm, lets Clint work it out for himself, taking hold of his ankles just in case he tries to pull them away. It’s obvious Clint knows what he’s doing, because his eyes dart down to his own feet as he smirks.

But Steve just holds on, and waits for Clint to believe him, will wait forever if he has to. He’s got the time.

It takes four attempts for Clint to actually lift his hands again properly, and a fifth to get around to signing something back.

_I didn’t want to lie to you._

Steve understands, now. Without the reeling shock still stinging, it’s a much less bitter pill to swallow already. Steve isn’t glad Clint lied to him, but he is glad Clint kept his word to Bucky, and that’s enough to soothe the hurt leftover from the realisation of who exactly he was looking at on that screen in the bunker.

_Thank you for taking care of him._

Clint’s jaw squares at Steve’s response, and he looks down at his own hands with an odd, hurting look.

When he signs back, his fingers flutter more than usual.

_Do you want to come with me when I leave?_

“Yes!” Steve gasps, loud and instinctive, flinching as he scrambles to repeat it with his hands even as Clint laughs almost audibly.

_Yes please, _Steve says emphatically three times with his hands and the sound trapped in Clint’s throat is warm and wonderful.

_Of course, _he signs back. _He’s going to call me tomorrow morning. Do you want to talk to him again?_

_Yes, _Steve replies, with as much restraint as he can manage.

Clint grins, looking brighter than he has done in days. Some of the stress has lifted from his eyes and his brow, and when he settles back against the arm of the sofa and closes his eyes, he actually looks like he might sleep this time, which had seemed nigh on impossible when Steve first sat down.

It’s only this realisation that jolts a reminder as to what had prompted Steve to find Clint in the first place.

He squeezes Clint’s ankle, tight enough for Clint to open his eyes and look at him.

With one fortifying breath, Steve lifts his hands again, with more determination than before.

_Does V-I-S-I-O-N make you uncomfortable?_

Despite three years of practice, Steve only barely manages to catch the lie in Clint’s bemused smile.

_Why would he make me uncomfortable? He’s a perfect being. Even Thor’s distrustful hammer thinks so._

Steve doesn’t let himself get suckered into it, but it’s too late, because Clint’s eyes are closed again.

He’s not entirely sure whether Clint has his aids in or not, seeing as Tony’s latest upgrades are so damn small it’s close to impossible to tell without an intrusive amount of attention. Even if Clint can hear him, he’s made it perfectly clear he doesn’t want to speak, and however important it is that Clint pays attention to what Steve has to say, it’s just as important that Steve respects that wish.

So, Steve reaches out and puts a hand, heavy starfish, on Clint’s sternum.

Clint flinches at the sudden touch, and in his instinct opens his eyes to glare at Steve, who is not above a little _Disappointed Captain _pouting when required. Clint clenches his jaw uneasily, blinking. Holds his gaze steady all the same.

Slowly, Steve takes the weight off Clint’s chest to sign.

_Because the stone he is built from was used to torture you._

It's only Steve's enhanced reflexes that keep Clint in place. His hands are vices, barely bruise-shy as he grabs Clint's ankles, who luckily had been aiming for backwards instead of a side roll, so instead of being half tossed of the couch in his haste, Clint is simply jerked back into place with a huff of pain.

His eyes are steel betrayal, his expression is mutinous.

When Steve gives no indication he's letting go, Clint signs with violent movements,

_It wasn't the stone. It was L-O-K-I._

Steve is, briefly, relieved he at least isn't going to have to fight Clint on whether or not what happened to him three years ago can be constituted as torture. It seems that argument, at least, has finally been put to bed for good.

It's probably also a relief to know Clint recognises the difference between the stone's raw power and Loki's malicious use of it. Steve doesn't really have much space for that, though, if Clint is going to treat this recognition as synonymous with not having a right to be upset about it.

There's no doubt helping Wanda and recovering from the fight have been a drain on Clint's resources, but Steve is convinced that the very presence of the stone is doing him no favours whatsoever. He's been on high alert ever since Vision was brought to life, strung out and battered, and he looks ready to break his own ankles to get out of Steve's grip, but he doesn't.

The silence they share, it's always been an easy thing.

That doesn't mean it's always been comfortable.

Steve locks eyes with Clint and doesn't back down, not at their dampness and not at their wide blown pupils. He's prepared to wait out the worst of Clint's stubbornness. If Clint survived the week Steve spent in recovery after the Helicarrier crash in the Potomac waiting out Steve's worst impulses, then Steve can wait all night now.

It takes over ten minutes this time for Clint to relax enough for Steve to let go of his legs. His hands hover briefly over the tightly corded lower legs resting over his own thighs, but Clint makes no obvious escape attempt. He just glowers furiously with his fingers drumming over each other on his chest.

With the same soft slowness as before, Steve continues, his lips following the melody of his movements,

_I didn't ask to embarrass you. I asked because I want to help._

With a wickedly reactive sneer, Clint throws back,

_You can’t help._

Steve, despite his very best efforts, recoils from the force of it, looking down at Clint’s socked feet in his lap. He tries to nod, but it’s like trying to bend his shield, just tipping his head forwards. He can’t stand it.

Clint’s right, he _can’t _help, and it burns him in his core.

There’s nothing Steve fears worse than helplessness. Others’, and his own.

This time, when Clint extracts himself from Steve’s grip, Steve lets him without fuss. He’s left looking instead at his own two hands, half clasped together. Strong enough to break bones and brickwork, but that’s no good to him here. He’s got a team that keeps on growing, and it’s everything he never dared to want and now he has it he’s suddenly found himself confronted by the magnitude of responsibility he has to keep them that way.

How exactly is he supposed to do that? Hell, not two weeks ago, he punched Clint in the face. Could’ve killed him, if Clint hadn’t dodged all but the clip of one knuckle. Wanda’s lost her brother and Tony’s lost JARVIS and Bruce is God knows where. It’s already happening, Steve can see it right before his eyes, the tiny splinters that could one day be chasms.

A hand, warm and strong, snags him abruptly by the back of the neck and he flinches, looks up at Clint, cross-legged, all sorrow.

With one hand, Clint signs as best he can,

_Sorry._

Steve shakes his head and Clint scrambles closer, removes his hand and the warmth is missed as he repeats, more insistently,

_Steve. Sorry. I didn’t mean that._

It’s a lie, because he was right, and they both know it.

Steve nods anyway and Clint grimaces. Knocks him on the shoulder to regain his attention.

_I know how you can help._

There is nothing more obvious in the world, perhaps in the entire galaxy, than what Clint is about to suggest.

Despite himself, Steve laughs.

_I’m not making coffee for you at one AM._

Clint pulls a look of such deep tragedy, it drags another reluctant laugh out of Steve’s throat.

He sits back a little on the couch when Clint bullies his feet back into his lap, smiling through the twinge in his chest as the archer grins at him with the kind of truthful trust it took months and months to earn, and Steve wouldn’t risk for anything.

Clint’s hands move again in those same, fluttery flicks he’s not used to.

_You do more than enough every day, Steve._

Before he can be called out on being so uncharacteristically sincere, Clint lies his head back on the armrest of the couch and closes his eyes, projecting very loud sleep vibes.

Steve grins, rests a heavy sea star hand on Clint’s sternum for another few seconds, then drops his head back onto the cushions, Clint’s ankles in his grip.

He must at least drift some of the way towards sleep, because he’s surprised to realise, a little while later, that the lamps have been turned off. The room is a blurring blue of shadows, only the slits of light from an open doorway to illuminate anything.

There’s also, he realises when he looks down, a blanket stretched over his legs, a second one tucked half around Clint, who looks like he hasn’t moved an inch.

Surprised, he looks up blearily through sleep sticky lashes at the dark room.

On an armchair not far behind Clint’s head, Wanda is curled around a cushion. She’s burrowed into a blanket of her own, and her eyes are closed just a little too tightly to be believable.

Steve smiles, leans his head back, closes his eyes, and sleeps.

*

In Azzano, Bucky had this look, like Steve hadn’t ever seen before. This frantic wildness, bright penny eyes and shaky fingers. Maybe Steve should’ve noticed, even then. The difference. Maybe he did.

The serum changed Steve in ways that seemed important to everyone else, except they never seemed to realise that _good _wasn’t necessarily _easy._

It took him over a month to get used to breathing without worrying about the oxygen catching in his lungs. He’d come to his senses, sometimes, after twenty-two hours of waking, tearing off his costume and knocking back whatever cupful of nothing was handed to him, realising he should be halfway to his grave exhausted, should be choking on that liquor, should be dying of a fever in this wet air. Only, he wasn’t.

What changed about Steve when the serum kissed his bloodstream, it was all packaging.

But Azzano. _Bucky._

Maybe Steve should’ve noticed sooner, because that serum-adjacent, whatever it was, it didn’t change the packaging. No, it was worse than that. They put something inside James Barnes that he couldn’t claw out. There was something in there, that wasn’t born in Brooklyn.

That twenty-twenty hindsight, when Steve is sitting shackled in the back of an armoured truck. When he says, _Zola, _and he doesn’t look up to check Sam’s reaction, or Natasha’s. When he voices it for the first time, he is forced to confront something he has never dared say aloud.

The man he pulled out of the wires of Azzano, he might have worn his best friend’s face, but he wasn’t all Bucky Barnes. Even then, Steve had been able to tell he was different.

Chalked it up to wartime, chalked it up to trauma. Chalked it up to how fighting and dying and killing changes a man.

Told himself lies like bedtime stories, slept better at night for it, too, in the dirt of Europe remembering home. Bucky still cracked jokes to cut his Captain’s ego down to size, and he still threw punches like baseballs, and he still kissed a girl’s hand gentle enough to make her glow. He was still Bucky, and Steve told himself time and again that that was all there was to it.

But that face that looked up at him, frantic wildness. Penny bright eyes and shaky fingers.

If Steve had only said something at the time. If that’d been the kind of thing they dared to do. If he’d just had the wherewithal to ask instead of assume.

If, if, if.

*

_You’re my friend, _Steve tells the Winter Soldier on the Helicarrier above D.C., because it’s the truth, if only one part of it.

He has neither the courage nor the breath to tell him the rest, braced for impact, that clenched titanium fist.

_You’re all the parts of me I tried to drown in the Arctic._

*

Three months after the battle against Loki and the Chitauri, Steve finally gets around to doing something he’d actively avoided from the moment he understood where and when he was, his abrupt and terrifying place in the world.

He buys a biography of Steven Grant Rogers and he reads it, start to finish, in one go. Like swallowing down medicine fast to avoid the taste.

It’s called _Steve Rogers: The Star-Spangled Man._

Historically speaking, Steve can’t fault the writer’s accuracy. She’s done her research, and she can’t be an all-round terrible person because she managed to snag an interview with Jim Morita for some of the anecdotes. He always was a particularly good judge of character.

It’s a significantly less romanticised account of Steve’s life than he’d been worried it would be. A bit too many adjectives, perhaps, but it’s not the hero worship that some of the other biographies appeared to be full of, based on their reviews.

Steve reads about his life with a disorienting sense of removal from the words on the pages. He reads about his mother with the substantial relief of realising that other people have read this book, that whatever else they have learned from it, they have also learned of Sarah Rogers’ genuine heroism. The kind that goes unrecognised because there are no medals for motherhood, despite how it so regularly taxed her beyond her limits.

He’s unaccountably grateful to know other people are aware of her importance.

It’s not until he’s coming to the concluding pages, gearing up for the tragedy, that Steve is wrenched from the cushion cloud of distancing himself from the man trapped in the spine of this book by the author’s startling frankness, the scalpel of her inferences.

_…unclear how much Barnes’ death contributed to Rogers’ actions in those last few days, up to and including his sacrifice and ultimate suicide._

Well, then.

It’s late evening by the time he gets to it, sitting on a large windowsill that overlooks Manhattan, the sun barely setting and the muscle of his heart lodged in his throat. He closes the book over one placemark finger, pulling his knees a little closer to his chest, and stares out at the buildings beyond.

This is not the first time the situation has been posed to him as such.

Alma, young, engaged, a green streak in her hair and a very nice coffee maker in her office, blindsided him with it a while ago. It’s different, though, talking about abstract ideas of life and death and choice with a therapist, compared to reading about it in a book. Compared to realising that’s how other people see it.

Do they?

He can still taste the glacier cold of his freezing lungs, the hysteria of his encroaching death, Peggy’s sadness burning through his own. He can still remember, only days before that, Bucky’s hands reaching for him, the ghost of his voice as he fell. Steve’s name in his mouth.

That tiny, momentary impulse to let go, too.

He opens the book again, devouring the last sixteen pages the same way he used to read everything when he was stuck in a bed, with loneliness and his mother’s warm anxiety and Bucky’s reckless fretting for company.

Once it’s finished, he tosses it in the bin, packs a bag and walks out to the communal kitchen.

Bruce is there, with steeping tea and four notebooks spread out across the worktop. Steve’s always respected his appreciation for _old school, _as Clint calls it, however much Tony rolls his eyes whenever he sees someone holding a pen.

“Steve,” Bruce says, without comment for whatever emotions Steve is pretty sure he’s telegraphing right now. “You OK?”

“I’m taking a few days,” Steve says without really thinking about it. “Been saying I need to see more of this country I’m supposedly Captaining.”

Bruce nods, clasping his fingers loosely over his book with a patient look that itches over Steve’s skin.

“I’ll tell the others,” he says. “If you want to avoid a fuss.”

Underneath the ant buzz, Steve is relieved.

“Thanks, Bruce,” he says, because he’s not sure how easily he’d stand up to Tony’s intrusive questions, or Natasha’s knowing eyes, or Clint’s unsolicited understanding.

If Bruce answers, Steve doesn’t hear it. He’s already out of the door, marching down the stairs just in case JARVIS has elevator protocols, and it’s not until he reaches his Harley-Davidson in the lower garage that he realises his hands are shaking.

His breath rattles out of him, the way it used to, in the company of loneliness, and his mother, and Bucky.

He sits astride his motorcycle, with his head in his hands, and waits for his heart to stop pounding triple time with the bite of ice in his thoughts.

*

By the time he comes back, five weeks and a few thousand miles later, he’s read three more biographies, watched six films that range from dubious to humiliating and four documentaries of questionable worth, and has stretched as much distance as he can between the man who woke up in the ice and the man who crashed into it to begin with.

Breathes a little easier for it. Knows, unaccountably, whatever choice it was he made, it was the right one.

*

In the wake of Ultron’s defeat. That strange, unshakeable stillness, it takes hold of the Avengers Base that Tony’s been pretending not to be working on for the past year.

Clint stays for sixteen days, before touting duties beyond Avenging in need of his attention, and Steve finds himself unable to count how many times he’s done it before. Finds himself wondering a lot of things.

Surprisingly, or perhaps not, Tony is the one who puts up the biggest fuss about it.

Or, the Stark equivalent of a big fuss these days, which is suddenly having a million updates to make for Clint’s hearing aids and bow and arrows and armour. Clint deals with Tony gracelessly, acceding no time whatsoever for his attention. It seems a little harsh, right up until it seems completely necessary.

Tony backs down, and Clint throws a paper airplane at him across the room which he opens up and almost smiles at.

Clint grins, gives Steve a sarcastic _Aw shucks _expression, and adds in a pointedly distracted, throwaway voice,

“Oh, and I’m stealing Cap for a while, too. And Nat. So, you’re in charge of the kids. OK! Bye! Have fun!”

Swings out of the room with a gleeful hoot of laughter and Tony looks visibly torn between giving chase and giving in. He looks up at Steve, eyes dark and tired.

“Has he slept since the kid died?”

This is the last thing Steve expected him to ask, and he blinks at Tony, surprised, before answering.

“Some,” he says with a tilt of his head. “Being here isn’t doing him any good though.”

Tony nods, still fiddling with the paper airplane.

“He’s a minefield,” he says, a little callous, a little sad. “Don’t party too hard, OK, cowboy? The newbies won’t train themselves. And I sure as shit won’t.”

If he’s angling for a reprimand, he’ll be waiting a long time. Tony’s mouth wrangles around something more substantial, then he scrunches the paper in his hand and walks away without further comment.

Steve wonders briefly if it would be a breach of privacy to call Pepper, or Rhodey.

Before he can decide, Natasha is there, a bag in hand, looking expectant.

“Barton _will _leave without us,” she says with some measure of threat.

She’s dressed more casually than he’s seen her in a while, her hair curling and her sweater a warm shade of green. There is no trace of grief to be found in her startling face, not that he’d have expected anything else.

“You ready?” she asks, and it’s only then that Steve remembers, exactly, where they’re going.

On the tarmac, a year ago, more than that by now. _Who the hell _and Steve’s heart shattered.

Months and months and months and now, finally, the last of the ice is about to thaw.

Steve nods, all nerves, and can’t keep the grin off his face.

“Let’s go,” he says, to Natasha’s biting smirk.

*

“You said some hurtful, blindly stupid things,” she says, later, and she doesn’t need to twist her agenda for Steve to bow to it like a condemned man. He knows exactly how badly he’s messed this one up.

Her hand rests lightly on his forearm, a feather weight pinning him, strong as vibranium.

She tells him: “You’re not the first person in the world to lash out when they’re surprised.”

No, he’s not. But he’s got a harder hit than most, in his fists and in his words, so he thinks maybe that’s not an excuse he should be allowed to hide behind. Not this time.

Her presence is more comfort than he can bear.

*

Six days after the end, Steve goes to Bed-Stuy alone.

When he returns a day later to the upstate base with an affectionate golden retriever trotting at his heels, he’s greeted with suspicion and adoration and confusion by Bruce, and Rhodey, and Thor. Carol has already taken leave of Earth. Pepper has disappeared Tony to somewhere unreachable and unknown.

Lucky is overwhelmed by the attention, flitting between the six hands ruffling him, as if he were some bright and shining thing that could undo the darkness enveloping them. He is, in a way; always has been.

Steve’s filling a bowl of water for the panting dog when Lucky makes a yipping, excited sound, followed by the click of his nails on the hardwood floor. By the time Steve turns around, the goddamn gorgeous dog has hastened away from all three men and has barrelled directly into an ashy faced Natasha Romanov.

She drops immediately to her knees, not unlike Steve had done, and just like Steve her arms curve naturally around Lucky as he licks at her face and rubs his head over her throat.

“Good boy,” she murmurs in a rough quiet whisper that Steve can barely hear.

Her eyes find him, over the golden fur, and what passes between them, unspeakable. It is not gratitude, nor condemnation, nor grief. It is a precious understanding, a mutual respect of ownership. They are all he has left, now. Natasha buries her face in Lucky’s fur and kisses his ears and he glows with it, her love, which is the realest thing in the room.

When Steve looks away, it’s to find Thor staring at him. His eyes, mismatched and yet, as they have always been.

Full of galaxies, gentle depths.

Steve puts the bowl of water down a few steps away from the bundled pair, assassin and retriever, folding into each other as if by design. Bruce and Rhodey are close by, determinedly not-watching as they return to their work, and when Steve steps back he finds himself standing in line with a god.

Thor puts his hand on Steve’s shoulder, and Steve is inexplicably embarrassed to recall his own jealousy, when Thor had done the same to Natasha only a couple of weeks ago.

“You’re a good man,” Thor says, and not for the first time, Steve is struck by how easy it is to hear his years in his voice.

Steve twists his teeth around a denial that rises up his throat, instinctive.

He looks at his friend, and wonders how in all his lifetimes Thor can think that, now.

“I don’t know what to do,” Steve says, and it’s not until the words are out of his mouth that he realises the truth of them.

He knows, with every hurting fibre of his body, every droplet of serum in his veins, that there is nobody else left on this earth that he could dare breathe those words to.

The only one, gone. Steve’s name in his mouth for the second time, it _burns _him, it scorches. He’s gone, again.

Thor doesn’t let go of his shoulder, even as he looks away, back to Natasha, to the goddamn gorgeous dog.

“Neither do I,” Thor replies.

It might just be the most frightening thing Steve’s ever heard.

*

Lucky’s got a collar with his name on it.

On the back, a neatly engraved arrow.

Bruce gives Steve this look, when he sees it. Indiscreet, apologetic. A look that says: _I recognise what you’re trying to do._

*

_Come on, Captain, _Tony says, as he stands over a half-built time machine, a churlish scoff that’s breaking their truce, bruising them both, because he can. _You can’t be that naïve._

Turns out he can, though.

Turns out he can.

*

“Sometimes it feels like I didn’t know him at all,” Steve murmurs selfish into his untouched scotch.

Natasha does not dignify him with a response.

*

They land in a bare field, the same one as before. It feels like years, but it was barely weeks ago.

The house is the same, leaning into the dirt, blistered by the sun, a cluttered veranda and a barn with a paint-stained door. Steve can taste adrenaline under his tongue, he holds his breath but it just traps the jitters in with him, bouncing through his nervous system.

Beside him, Clint shuts down the jet with only a few flicks of his hands, and the silence engulfs them.

“You ready?” Clint asks, when it becomes clear Steve isn’t going to speak first.

The house looks like it’s been shut up for years, like it wasn’t full of superheroes two and a half weeks ago.

Steve nods, doesn’t trust his voice. When he turns his head, Natasha is already stood waiting for the tail-end of the jet to release her. He follows, stiff joints, psychosomatic, as if for the first time recognising the century in his limbs. He’s waited for this, waited even when he didn’t realise that’s what he was doing.

Treading water between swimming, along the current and against it. Waiting for this.

When the back ramp opens, lets in the pouring of the breeze, Steve flinches and laughs at himself, and Natasha smirks in response.

Steve steps down, has one foot on the dry grass when he looks up and is brought to a short, sharp halt.

_Who the hell _and Steve’s heart shattered, but that was months ago, a year gone by now.

James Buchanan Barnes is standing at the bottom of the porch steps.

Every bone in Steve’s body turns to jellied steel. He’s caught between grinning like he hasn’t in seventy years, and bursting into the tears right here and now. His heart thumps heavy and his lungs are full and James Buchanan Barnes, _Bucky, _gives him the shyest smile he’s ever damn seen. Frightened, maybe, penny bright.

That frantic wild thing from Azzano.

“Hey, punk,” he whispers, shaky on the exhale, and Steve laughs, hasn’t heard that voice in person since it dragged his name through the cliffs of the Alps.

He’d thought hearing it over the phone was a gift from God, but it’s no miracle on this. On step by step closing the metres of their distance, while Bucky tenses and Steve refuses to. Closes the gap with purpose and before he knows it, he’s got Bucky Barnes wrapped tight in a hug that Steve’s been needing every waking airless second of the past four years.

Bucky’s laugh hasn’t changed since 1945. Rips out of him rough and he’s clinging back, flesh and metal, and he’s _safe here safe warm safe safe safe._

“Jesus, Buck,” Steve coughs out clingy and his ribs are protesting but his heart is begging otherwise.

“I really did leave all the stupid with you, didn’t I?” Bucky replies in a growling reprimand and Steve laughs wet and choking and can’t quite bring himself to let go yet.

Behind him he can hear two cautious sets of footsteps.

“Pony up,” he hears Clint whisper. “Told you there’d be manly tears.”

Whatever Natasha’s response is, it’s interrupted by Bucky saying, louder into Steve’s shoulder,

“One thousand dollars for the jar, Hawkeye,” and the splatter of laughter is finally enough for Steve to pull away, grinning.

Doesn’t quite let go yet, though. Just turns, blinking the sting of tears away with a hand on Buck’s shoulder to look at Clint and Natasha, who are standing primly side by side looking awfully pleased with themselves. Hawkeye and the Black Widow. Two neat bookends; they’re a lethal, marvellous pair.

Natasha’s sly amusement is a poor mask for the delight in her eyes. Clint’s grey glitter gaze is darting back and forth between Steve and Bucky with dizzying speed.

Eventually Clint ducks his head, a scratch for the back of his neck as he lets out an exaggerated sigh and ducks around them.

“Let’s get inside,” he says, light tremor of what must be relief, and Bucky follows, tugging Steve along for the ride.

“Come on, _Captain Amer’ca,” _he says, very loudly, the way he always did, when it was just the two of them, and his disdain for showboating was bleeding through playful like the smoke of his cigarettes.

Steve lets himself be pulled in, stumbles as he goes, and Bucky laughs at him, and it’s the single best sound he’s ever heard.

*

_Yeah, and I think I deserve something good, that’s my choice, you sanctimonious asshole._

*

Bucky’s anger hasn’t changed since 1945, either. Rips out of him rough, wet eyed and scarlet cheeked.

*

(Later, locked-up, lonely. Clint, years ahead. _M’sorry. _To Steve’s protestations, insistent, battered. _He’s jus’ easy t’love, y’know?)_

*

This is how it happens.

*

Because there is nothing else he can physically do without violence, Steve returns to the jet.

Storms, might be more accurate.

In the lingering light, pretty pre-sunset that’s pouring molten gold over the horizon, he can’t bring himself to stay outside. Can’t bask in the cool breeze when it’s snaking through his bone marrow. He returns to the jet with energy livid in his veins and he sits in the pilot’s seat and he thinks about taking off.

His breaths are harsh in his ears, ringing with Bucky’s shouting and with his own and he forgot, how do you forget? Loving someone that hard makes arguing with them all the worse. It’s a vulnerable business, sharing your soul with another human being. Makes for deep bruises when things turn sideways.

_I think I deserve _he’d said, like Steve would ever deny him it, like that wasn’t what Steve _wanted _for him, like it wasn’t a thousand wishes come true.

The jet swallows up Steve’s rage. Takes it, indifferent. He wants to punch his way out of here but there’s nobody standing in his way, except perhaps himself.

It would hardly be the first time.

Steve presses his fingers against his eyes. Every piece of his soul wants to go back inside and apologise. Every piece of his heart wants to go back and shout some more. He’s always been a war within himself, long before the ice froze up his body and his mind, before even the serum changed the packaging.

Up ahead, along the line of trees as he scans the horizon, he can see a shape scooping through the air above the branches. An early waking owl of some kind, dark, elegant. Steve holds his breath and watches its trajectory, until it dips out of sight.

He swallows dryly, and he doesn’t move, not even when someone enters the jet through the open doors he didn’t get around to closing.

Not someone, of course. Natasha. He’d recognise her approach amidst a thousand pairs of silently treading feet.

She’s still wearing her soft green sweater, and her hair is still curled daintily around her face, and when she leans comfortably back in the co-pilot’s chair it’s with the air of someone who did not just sit in a room adjacent from two bellowing super soldiers. There’s a kind of grace to that indifference that even now Steve can’t bring himself to stop admiring.

When Natasha does not speak, gives in fact no indication of planning to, Steve does instead, in a tight voice that scratches at his throat.

“Did you know?” he asks, slave to his masochism, asking questions he knows the answer to even when he doesn’t want to hear it. Especially when he doesn’t want to hear it. “Of course you did.”

Natasha doesn’t even look at him.

“You going back to New York?” she asks and it doesn’t matter how neutral her tone is, he knows exactly what she thinks of that, and what she heard, because he heard it loud and clear, too.

_Get out, Steve. I am not kidding right now._

There was this one time, crotchety as all hell, when Steve told Bucky he was making his asthma worse just by being there, and for some reason Bucky believed him. High-tailed it out of Steve’s room like he’d been stung by a thousand wasps and it took two days for him to slink back in, nervous and apologetic, carrying a pack of pencils he almost certainly stole in meek, adolescent offering.

That was a different Bucky, though. A younger one, before the frantic wild thing in his blood.

“Well I can’t stay here,” Steve replies, which isn’t true but it isn’t false either, there’s no answer to this non-question because every piece of his soul wants to go back inside and apologise while every piece of his heart is still yelling.

Natasha tilts her head to the side, eyes flicking across the horizon as she clasps her hands in her lap and puts her feet up on the controls, maybe just to see if he’ll tell her to put them down. He doesn’t.

“That’s…illogical,” she tells him.

Steve grits his teeth and tries to ignore the fact he heard her use this tone of voice a week ago on a caffeine buzzed Tony Stark.

“You’re leaving, because you’re mad,” she says in a light, thinking-through voice that is as unwelcome as the stirring in Steve’s guts just at the thought of actually _going._

When Natasha finally deigns to look at him, he’d really rather she didn’t.

“You’re mad, because you think that Hawkeye. A man you have trusted and fought beside for years. Is doing wrong by your oldest friend. By having the audacity to fall in love with him.”

There are lots of dangerous things about Steve, nowadays. The power of his unpulled punches, the toss of his shield. The serum changed the packaging but it didn’t change him. That’s what some people don’t seem to understand. He’s always been like this. This has always been him.

“I thought love was for children,” he tells her with a radiant, violent smile that he has no right to give her, words he has no right to voice, that do not belong to him and never did, and if Natasha slapped him right now, hand or bite, he would deserve it.

She doesn’t, though. She just looks at him, as she always has, as if she had expected nothing more or less from him.

He’d rather the slap, he realises, hand or bite. Natasha is a friend unasked for and desperately needed. Disappointing her would feel terrible, but worse? Worse is meeting her very lowest expectations.

Natasha tells him, without so much as raising her voice: “I might think Clint is an idiot, but I don’t think he’s abusive.”

“I didn’t say he –” Steve tries to smack over her words, outraged overtures, but it’s weak at best.

“You compared it to Stockholm Syndrome,” she says, and for all her soft inflections the words cut as intended because, yes, he had done, hadn’t he?

Steve winces at his own words thrown into his flinching face. He had said exactly that, had mouthed off instinctively and _I didn’t mean it _is poor defence for a man who has built a reputation on saying the right thing and he knows it.

“Which, by the way,” Natasha adds, somehow managing to sound _amused _beneath the thin layer of frost coating her words. “Shows a very poor understanding on your part of what Stockholm Syndrome is. Unless you’re also suggesting Clint has been keeping him prisoner, too.”

Childish, maybe, that he looks away from her then, but he can’t help it. He can’t look at her face without seeing Bucky’s.

“Steve,” she says anyway, like she knows, like she gets it, which makes little sense because she’s self-confessed to shooting Hawkeye twice in her life and still probably has never hurt him like Steve has today. “You can fly back to New York. I’ll be right here by your side. But you will regret it before you cross the state line.”

Steve flinches when her hand touches his forearm and he looks down at her pale fingers splayed over his skin. Light as a feather and strong as vibranium, that’s her, this woman, this friend.

“You said some hurtful, blindly stupid things,” she says, like it’s no crime that can’t be atoned. “You’re not the first person in the world to lash out when they’re surprised.”

No, he’s not, of course he’s not. But Steve, he’s the same as he’s always been and yet he’s not. He’s got a harder hit than most, in his fists and in his words, so he thinks maybe that’s not an excuse he should be allowed to hide behind. Not this time.

Her presence is more comfort than he can bear.

She’s still looking at him, and in her eyes are all the bad things he let his silences imply.

“Don’t run away from this,” Natasha tells him.

He wants to refute it. He’s Steven Grant Rogers: The Star-Spangled Man. He’s never run away in all his sorry life. To his own detriment, and others’ too.

“Clint trusts you,” she continues, like that isn’t the funniest, most terrible thing of all. “He admires you. Do you know why?”

Steve closes his eyes against the silver pink of the setting sun. Burned into his retinas, Hawkeye on that couch back at the base, the strange flutter of his hands signing _I didn’t want to lie to you. _The way not even Steve’s acceptance seemed to rest his nerves.

Caught in the memory, he cannot answer, so Natasha does it for him.

“Because you’ve earned it. Not because you’re Captain America. Not because you can outrun the devil and still look good for the photos. Because you’ve put in the work and you’ve earned it.”

No, no, Steve was wrong. _That _is the funniest, most terrible thing of all.

His anger is oxidising, now it has been let loose. Rusting over into something unmanageable and less easily directed, spilling inwards and outwards in all directions. _Hate is a double-edged blade, Steven, _his mother used to say. _It cuts both ways._

Hardship taught Sarah Rogers all the worst lessons early. She tried her best to pass them on more gently to her son.

“I think that ship has long sailed by now, Natasha,” he finally replies, very quietly, like muscles quivering under the strain of an overwhelming weight.

When he looks at her, she’s the same as she always has been. That’s the difference between them, what sets them apart, and binds them. Around her throat, a thin gold chain linked by an arrow. It’s a piece of her, as vital as her eyes. The odd occasions when she doesn’t have it on, Steve always feels jarred.

He wonders if she does, too.

“Would I be talking to you right now, if that was even remotely true?” she asks. Her fingers slide up to his shoulder, squeezing when she stands back up. “Think about it.”

When she leaves, Steve is sitting in the exact same spot, breathing the exact same breaths, wondering the exact same things, and it’s a little like she was never there at all.

*

There will be a time, soon, in a future they deserve, when this is but the briefest interlude.

It is a punishment befitting the crime of humanity, that anger has a way of making everything feel so much worse than it really is.

*

Only half an hour at most passes, but it’s almost dark by the time a second pair of feet trudge up into the jet, making no attempt at subtlety.

Steve’s not sitting quite so rigid anymore. His hands are loose in his lap. It’s a poor imitation of relaxed. He’s reluctantly surprised to realise, for a brief moment, he doesn’t know which of them it is. They are the same in so many ways and it’s laughable, almost, how foolish he was to be surprised at all.

Clint steps readily into view. Doesn’t take the co-pilot’s seat like Natasha had but why would he? He’s not leaving, and Steve hardly left them on even footing, walking out like that, even if his absence had been demanded.

He looks up, because Clint deserves it, and finds he doesn’t have it in him to ask if Clint heard what he said. Doesn’t need to, really. It’s written all over Clint’s face.

Except, Clint’s got a thermos in both of his hands. Huge, a very particular shade of blue. There’s a ring of white stars beneath the lid and a red stripe around the bottom. He’s tapping his middle fingers on it, arrhythmic.

“If you’re going to sulk here all night, you may as well do it with coffee,” Clint tells him.

It’s a hard, chastising voice. Steve’s heard it before, though never quite like this.

“I’m not –” he tries to say, but Clint isn’t in a listening mood.

He puts the thermos at Steve’s feet.

“Sorry, not sulking?” Clint scoffs very loudly and very pointedly as he steps back. “Brooding, then. You and Bucky have that much in common.”

“Clint,” Steve tries to say, tries to warn. He really, really doesn’t want to be goaded into a fight right now because he’s kind of spoiling for one but also he’s pretty sure he never ever wants to fight anything or anyone ever again.

“I don’t want to hear it, Steve,” Clint snaps. There’s colour in his cheeks and thorns in his eyes. “I’m not interested in your accusations, or your apologies, and I’m certainly not going to apologise to you.”

Buried deep underneath his outrage, there is a voice within Steve’s very soul that sighs deeply in relief and says: _Good._

“I get that this is a shock,” Clint continues, without noticing the drop of Steve’s shoulders, or perhaps simply ignoring it. “I even get that you don’t really like me right now.”

“Clint –”

_“But,” _he soldiers on, flash of a snarl as he widens his stance like he’s standing his ground, like he’s barely clinging to his own resolve. “You do not get to make Bucky feel like crap, or like his choices aren’t valid.”

It is not a myth, after all. Clint Barton never misses a target.

Steve flinches, because there is no other response to that kind of accuracy. All the righteous anger in the world at the injustices forced upon his closest, oldest friend does not change the fact that that is exactly what he has done.

Unfortunately, or perhaps admirably if it didn’t sting so bad, Clint hasn’t finished yet.

“You don’t get to put on your stars and stripes and lay down the law here. You don’t get to railroad Bucky’s decisions like you know best. Because you _don’t, _Steve.”

If Steve could look Bucky in the eye and tell him he’s wrong, he can look Clint in the eye and hear the same now, one better. That much, he can do. Steven Grant Rogers: The Star-Spangled Man. He’s never run from anything in his life, and he isn’t going to run from the solar sadness that softens Clint’s entire expression, crossing his arms over his chest, vulnerable and brave.

“I know that hurts,” he says, like he’s got room for sympathy somewhere amidst everything else. “I know you want to know what’s best for Bucky right now, but you don’t. And I _am_ sorry for that. I can’t even begin to imagine how hard this is for you, and Bucky was an _idiot _to throw that on you without warning. But that’s no excuse.”

If Clint gets any more reasonable, Steve’s going to have to ask for his security code, because there is no way on God’s green earth this is his natural initial reaction to what happened back there. Steve refrains, just barely, from imagining what kind of state all the glassware inside the house is in, or if the living room wall is full of arrowheads.

He tries to do something with his face that isn’t the scowl he’s accidentally plastered on to cover up anything else that might show through. He’s not sure he manages.

“Clint,” he says a third time, and for a third time he is interrupted. First by Clint raising a hand up in a universal demand for silence, and then by a very deep breath that Clint lets out with a count that’s visible on his face.

“There’s a bed made up for you, and there’s lasagne in the oven. If you can find it in your star-spangled heart to get over your ego long enough to see that I’m not _taking advantage _of your best friend, you’re welcome to join.”

The visible pleasure Clint takes in Steve’s wince is, if anything, reassuring. He is angry, after all, and undoubtedly hurt. The offer is not a band-aid on a bullet hole. It’s an _in spite of _offer. Frightening, but genuine.

“If not,” Clint says with the fakest shrug Steve has ever seen, “then enjoy your coffee and have a safe flight.”

Without awaiting a response, Clint turns on his heel and marches out with the same, overly heavy footsteps as before.

Steve watches him go, until he’s out of sight, then continues to stare after him like he can see right through into the house.

Natasha was right. He’d regret it instantly. Not to mention, once he’s actually back at the base, who knows when he’ll next get away. This might fester for a long time to come.

_Don’t run away from this, _she said, and she meant it, and was right.

Steve picks up the thermos and, without any real need of it, takes a sip of the coffee. At the first gulp, he closes his eyes. He would laugh if he had the energy. The coffee is perfectly warm, one of the nice nutty brands Clint saves for when he wants to actually enjoy the coffee, not just stockpile it in his system. There are at least two scoops of chocolate in it, as well.

What exactly is he supposed to do with that? Folding house of cards, he collapses in all but his bones.

Steve takes another gulp, and thinks about Christmas Eve, 1943. The high rise blush of Bucky’s cheeks and the ferret look in his wild eyes as he avoided Steve’s gaze, like he thought Steve hadn’t always known. Like he thought it made a lick of difference who he was, like he was anything other than the bedrock of Steve’s soul.

He drinks more of the coffee, and tries to gather the impetus to move, to drag his feet back over that threshold, into a home that’s warm and welcoming.

When a voice shouts from outside the jet, he nearly spills it all over himself in his surprise.

_“If you are that worried about my virtue, you will be thrilled to know I have not had sex with your teammate!”_

A sound like laughter and horror falls out of Steve’s mouth, and there’s no mistaking the mortified squawk of _James Barnes! _that comes from inside the house.

He turns to see Bucky glaring up at him from the jet ramp. Frantic wild thing, penny bright eyes.

Bucky can’t seem to decide whether to put his hands on his hips or cross them over his chest, and the result is a twitchy mess of limbs that conjures the most vivid memory Steve’s been struck with in a long while.

Seventeen-year-old Rebecca Barnes, doing exactly the same thing as she argued with her mother about her brother’s use as a chaperone at a local dance. Only a few years between them, they should have been twins, the way they were together. A pair, bickering and spiteful and full of love.

She died before Steve was found in the ice, and for a moment his heart breaks, to realise Bucky probably won’t remember that argument. The way he’d inevitably chaperoned her with a scowl while she spun and smiled, the way he’d stepped between that slugger and his little sister with a feral kind of vengeance, and she’d grinned from behind him, biting her lip.

Eventually, Bucky gives up and lets his hands hang by his sides, all the better to glower moodily without distraction.

Steve tries to smile, and maybe he gets it right, because Bucky rolls his eyes. Doesn’t quite stop glaring, but Steve will claw back the miles from that one inch of give, even if it takes another year of slogging, by way of downright awkwardness.

“I’m s–”

“Get inside, Steven,” Bucky snarls, bristly porcupine of their adolescence, a distant prayer. “I’m not ready to forgive you yet, so you’re going to go inside, eat your lasagne and be _very fucking nice _to Clint while I make up my mind about how mad I am.”

He stalks away before Steve can reply.

Steve follows, very slowly, gripping the thermos like a lifeline as the jet closes up behind him and the house looms over him and he stops short at the doorway on the veranda, to see something he should have seen hours ago.

Bucky, flapping around the way he used to when Steve was sick, reckless fretting only he’s all deadly precision now; there’s power in his movements, every angle of him a threat. And further away, Clint Barton, _Hawkeye,_ watching him with absolute fondness, as if Bucky slamming cutlery onto the table hard enough to dent the wood is the most wonderful sight he’s ever laid eyes on.

Something blooms in Steve’s chest, buried under the rubble of his initial shock, a sunflower between the weeds.

Natasha appears with her usual catlike grace, holding out a beer bottle that he accepts. Somehow, this is a lot more threatening than her presence in the jet had been. A kind of final warning, perhaps, or a reminder of the knife edge he’s walking.

Steve smiles at her, and thanks her, and does his level best to do as he’s told.

*

Going inside is easy.

Eating the lasagne is even easier, because it’s very good lasagne.

Being nice to Clint, on the other hand, is difficult. Clint has pretty much always reacted to other people’s kindness like a cat being dumped in a bubble bath, and that’s without the additional embarrassment of Steve shouting several unsavoury things about him a couple of hours beforehand. He evades Steve’s subsequent niceness like it might be the death of him.

Steve tries anyway, tries very damn hard, and for reasons unfathomable to everyone but herself, Natasha is actually a very big help in his efforts. It earns her an accusatory glare from Bucky once or twice, but Steve catches Clint brushing his hand over hers more than once. He knows that move, he’s seen it before.

Reassuring gratitude, a partner’s thankful relief.

*

Steve stays for a week, that first time, and for all the travesty it could have been, in many ways it’s the best week of the twenty-first century he’s ever had.

“You’re still a self-righteous punk,” Bucky tells him as they walk the perimeter of the land, checking cameras and fencing and doing something that isn’t quite reminiscing, because that would involve both parties actually remembering much of anything.

“Yeah, I know,” Steve says, because at this point there’s no sense in apologising for it. It’s not like he’s ever going to be anything else.

Bucky’s right hand presses briefly between his shoulder blades, warm and strong. Like winter 1932; like summer 1944.

*

There will be a time, soon, in a future they don’t deserve, when this is but the briefest interlude.

It will be a waste of precious hours that could have been spent happy, instead of angry.

When Bucky looks up at him, when out of his mouth falls that awful word again.

_Steve?_

He vanishes, as if he never was, and Steve feels that wretched relief to know that, if nothing else at all, he doesn’t have to tell Clint, because Clint’s already gone, too.

*

Before they can decide on anything at all, Natasha takes Lucky for a walk of the compound.

Lucky looks up at her with those big dark eyes, tail thumping, so thrilled to be with her, so happy to be close and Steve feels a pang of empathy. _You and me both, pal._

He watches them leave, a heartbroken assassin and a goddamn gorgeous dog, sharing something between them that Steve would carry for them if he could.

Bruce is nowhere to be found, and Rhodey is a room away, on the phone and seems to think he’s successfully hiding the fact the voice on the other end is Pepper Potts.

Steve watches the screens run through data with absolutely no help from himself, barely taking in the ever-growing lists counting upwards, all those trillions they won’t ever know, a universe away. Beside him, Thor sits staring similarly at the screen, while they wait for Rhodey to come back.

After a while, Steve feels the prickle of being watched, and looks over to see Thor staring at his arm. Specifically, the leather armband he’s got wrapped below his elbow. He’s gotten used to the feel of it, already. Barely remembers it’s there most of the time.

Automatically, he lifts his arm towards Thor for further inspection, which he does with interest.

“This is not the one that Hawkeye wore,” he says, after a while.

Steve should know better than to be surprised that Thor would notice, yet he is. It is, after all, an identical replica.

“No,” he says, a crack of sound. “This is a new one. Newer, at least. Bucky has his old one. Had. I don’t.”

It only occurs to him as he says it, that Thor will probably have no idea what he’s talking about. The last time they spoke, Bucky Barnes was the missing Winter Soldier, and nothing more. The idea of explaining is a weary scratch upon his soul.

Thor doesn’t ask, though. He simply takes hold of Steve’s arm and pulls the strap around, trying to read the markings.

“It’s very beautiful,” he says after a while.

Steve nods, having nothing more to add. It is beautiful. Supple leather, perfectly tempered and carved into, exactly like Clint’s.

Bucky had handed it to him when he got to Wakanda, a race against time they did not have. Bucky told him: _“It’s Wakandan leather, inlaid with vibranium. Clint always said it was for protection and, well. It worked, didn’t it?_”

Somehow smiled as he said it, and somehow Steve smiled back.

Clint always had that leather strap, wherever he went. Fell off buildings wearing it, got shot in the gut wearing it, got captured by a Norse God wearing it and took on the entire world wearing it. Then he took it off in Germany, handed it to Bucky, lost a fight at an airport and a month later he was dead.

So, yes. Yes, it worked.

Steve had put on the new one Bucky handed him.

He wore it into battle with his vengeance and his Wakanda-gifted shield.

_Protection, and luck, _Clint always said. And Steve would say it worked, after all, except Bucky was wearing Clint’s old one and Thanos’ grand scheme still took him, so the theory falls flat there. A fool’s dream. There is no magic in leather and symbols, only the comfort of what was once a friend’s.

Tony had seen him with it it; Steve spotted the ghost in his eyes when he woke up and saw it in his hands. Rookie error, he’d been taken off guard. He thinks perhaps Tony had been wounded, to see it.

Now, a week later, Thor relinquishes his arm and Steve brings it closer to his chest than before, a little protective, unnecessarily possessive.

Without further comment on the band Thor says, slowly:

“A ship will arrive soon, I hope. A friend, an Asgardian. My – second-in-command. She took those she could save, those that Thanos _spared. _I told her to bring them to Midgard. I – I had hoped that they would be here by now, but I have not heard from them. When they arrive, I should like for them to find home here, on earth. I would appreciate your help in this, if it can be spared.”

Steve does not know the depths of humility it must take for a king and a god to ask this of a mortal man. He only knows that Thor asks it with the kind of dignity he himself has long aspired to. Skinny kid from Brooklyn to his bones, Steve’s pride has always been his greatest affliction, and he thinks he might not ever achieve what comes to Thor so naturally, now.

“Of course,” Steve says without authority, only hope. “Here, or –”

“There is a place, in the very north of Europe,” Thor says in the same slow, dignified voice. Calm, calmer than the storms of his eyes. “On the coast of Norway. That is where they might find peace. It is the last place I saw my father, before he passed on.”

Steve feels a tunnel of guilt opening up within him, the ricochet of understanding. For all that Thor has missed of their losses and gains, they too have missed so much of his.

“I didn’t realise,” Steve says. “I’m so sorry.”

Thor’s smile is small, and sad.

“I wished to grieve terribly, at first,” he admits. “But it was his choice, his _time. _It would have been selfish of me to demand more of him, after all he has given me.”

Of all the people Steve has ever known, there are so few who had all the time they deserved. It’s with a great weight lifting and crashing, magnificent as the sea, that he realises the only person he knows who truly fits that description is Peggy Carter. He never thought, in all his life, he’d find a way to be grateful for how things turned out, but he _is. _God in Heaven, if such a thing could ever exist, and beside him now, he is _grateful._

Peggy lived a long life, and it ended before her final suffering could be too great.

Thor’s right. It is selfish to demand more of a person than they are able to give, including their presence in this lasting, aching life.

Behind the glass wall to Steve’s left, he sees Rhodey bow his head, a hand over his eyes.

He looks at Thor again, at the deep crevices of his frown.

“I’m sorry about your brother.”

This time Thor’s smile is indulgent and terrible.

“That is a kind lie to tell me, Steve. However, it is unnecessary.”

For a moment the guilt churns and Steve struggles for air, for voice, for courage. It _is _a lie, in its own way. Six years ago, he’d have struggled not to celebrate such a death. Now death surrounds them, and it cannot be celebrated.

“I’m sorry,” he says again, with pronounced articulation. “For _your _loss. Whoever Loki was to me, he was your brother, and I am truly sorry you have lost him.”

That, at least, is true. He thinks he cannot be sorry that Loki is dead. But he does not enjoy Thor’s suffering, could not even in all Thor’s lifetimes. He considers, briefly, asking if Thor has heard news on the fate of his friends. Selvig, and Dr Foster, and Foster’s assistant.

“Thank you,” Thor replies before Steve can bring himself to ask, and afterwards it feels too perilous a query.

They sit together a little longer, in a silence that’s about as comfortable as is possible, confronted as they are by the faces of the unburied dead.

When Rhodey’s call ends he comes to them directly, tapping his cell phone against the palm of one hand.

“What news?” Steve asks, wary of Rhodey’s trepidation.

“That was Pepper,” he says, just in case it wasn’t obvious enough by the expression on his face.

Steve nods, tries for encouraging, for hopeful. Doesn’t bother asking how she is because she will be the same, he knows that now. Ever since she turned up at the base, half the universe oblivion and the man she loves possibly with it, and brought with her the entourage of her calmness and resilience.

“Tony’s return has not officially been announced,” Rhodey says. “Last anybody outside of us knows, he was declared missing a day before the end of the world. Pepper has talked to him, and – they’re not going to reveal he’s back.”

Steve honestly can’t bring himself to blame either of them.

“We need Stark Industries –”

“SI will be operational,” Rhodey reassures him. “Or, as operational as anything is right now. And Pepper will still be involved, remotely. But as far as the rest of the world is concerned, Tony Stark vanished on that spaceship and hasn’t been seen since. We aren’t saying he’s among the vanished. We’re just not saying anything. He’s got an entire fleet of suits, and he’s programmed them to me. Pepper says if we need anything, we can call, but.”

Steve nods, effectively cutting Rhodey off. He doesn’t need to hear her reasons and he doesn’t want to. If Steve could do the same, maybe bundle up that heartbroken assassin and that goddamn gorgeous dog far away from everything and anything, he would do it in a heartbeat.

“Thanks, Rhodey,” Steve says.

Rhodey shakes his head, scrubs at his brow with the back of his hand with a look of wonder.

“I’ve spent decades trying to get Tony Stark to do what’s best for himself,” he says, in a voice too far-off to read. “He finally does it, and you know what? I don’t think I’ve ever been more worried about him.”

Steve doesn’t have an answer to that, doesn’t think Rhodey needs one.

_Liar, _Tony said, so vicious, so meaningful, like he’d spent the last three weeks on that ship thinking it over and over, practicing how it should sound.

Only, he also said, _I lost the kid, _like he hadn’t even dared voice it before that very moment.

There’s so much bad feeling, Steve couldn’t parse through it if he tried. All he knows is this.

There are so few people he’s ever known who died at the right time, gifted with the years of life they deserve, and even if they spend the rest of their lives at opposite ends of the earth, he hopes to all hell that Tony Stark lives to be one of them.

*

(He doesn’t.)

*

Tony Stark dies at the snap of his own finger.

He makes the choice, doesn’t so much as flinch. He lays on the wire and then he cuts it, two for two.

Steve watches him die. Watches where he stands, a shard of vibranium strapped to his arm and a hammer in his hand; four broken ribs, broken femur and fibular and radius, he can feel the crack in his skull grating like a shifting tectonic plate. Blood in his mouth, in his eyes, in his boots.

Beside him, Bucky steps closer. Silently, he hooks two fingers into the strap of Wakandan leather still clinging to Steve’s arm.

Eleven years ago, Steve stood on a broken sidewalk in Manhattan, and watched Agent Romanov do the exact same thing to a trembling Agent Barton.

Steve watches Tony Stark die, speckled grey, with a daughter who will live, and a would-be son, too.

He understands a little better what he witnessed all those years ago. Clint Barton, the broad-shouldered duckling to Natasha Romanov’s steady gait. Two fingers hooked into a leather strap, holding the world together with a simple touch.

*

_We couldn’t, _Bruce says beforehand, because Bruce is pragmatic, because Bruce respects the laws of the universe.

Beside him, Tony is frowning, but that’s not what’s scary. What’s scary is his silence.

_Tony, _Steve says, and he can’t hide his own hope.

Tony, his silent frown. He has the most to lose, of all of them. And yet.

And yet.

_Why couldn’t we? _Tony asks. The motto he has lived by. _Half the universe, Brucie. What’s one more?_

*

When half the universe dissolves to ash, Steve adopts a goddamn gorgeous dog, helps put out a lot of fires with the aid of an absent Pepper Potts and a present James Rhodes and the ghost of Natasha Romanov, who is always in four places at once, at least.

Eventually, when the dust is settling and the fear is shifting beyond anger, into something sorrowful and damp, Steve gets a call from a man called Roland Holte, who introduces himself as a friend of _First Lieutenant Wilson’s, _and in honour of their friend they set up new support groups. Try to fill the void Sam left behind, his patience, and his care.

He moves into an apartment in Brooklyn, and he learns the streets rewritten for a second time in his life.

He catches word, occasionally, of a massacre here and there across the globe. Bodies littered with arrows. He tells Rhodey not to follow-up, but he thinks Natasha does anyway.

Tony calls, and says he has a daughter, trembles down the phone quieter than he’s ever been before. Steve is thrilled and distraught in equal measure.

The next time he can be spared after that strange, disorienting phone call, he visits Wakanda. He walks the pilgrimage of the southern mountains, to the place where the birds of prey hunt in their hundreds. He talks to the hawks; tells them he’s doing his best.

Somehow, time reaches onwards, towards the next horizon. The universe still exists, and Steve Rogers has a place in it.

*

“Where did it come from? Your leather guard?”

Clint ignores him for a few minutes, which Steve has to concede is fair. He _had _threatened to break the man’s bow and all his arrows yesterday. Clint’s entitled to be a little pissy.

Steve is lying in his bed as instructed, despite the fact he’s pretty sure he could get up if he tried. Whether he could stay up is another matter, but _getting _up, he’s confident he could manage.

Still, Clint has revealed a well of patience since opening his home to Steve in the aftermath of the fall of SHIELD, and Steve is doing his very best to show a modicum of gratitude whenever he is able. Between sudden demands for release and loud insistences he be given updates on the search for clues on the Winter Soldier, Steve is aware he is mostly failing at showing gratitude.

Clint is currently sitting cross-legged on a chair, tapping at a laptop with no less than seven phones spread out on Steve’s bedside cabinet.

His bruises, too, are starting to fade. He hasn’t told Steve what exactly happened between receiving an unexpected text from Natasha saying SHIELD was compromised and actually getting to D.C., but Steve has surmised it wasn’t all that pleasant. Clint’s only ever this tight-lipped when it was too nasty to make light of.

Eventually, Clint looks up from the laptop, lifting his left arm to look at the dark leather strap.

He runs a finger over it, a familiar move, and he smiles as he does it.

“It was a gift from a guardian angel,” he says, and despite the tease in his tone, there’s a root of sincerity that makes Steve pull himself up a little on his pillows, wincing.

It had been an idle question, mostly, but only because he hadn’t actually thought he’d get an answer out of him.

“Tell me,” he says, and Clint considers him.

He runs a thumb over the markings, dark carvings in shapes Steve’s never seen before.

“I told you what happened, when I left the circus,” Clint says.

_Left, _that’s a word for it. _Forced out, _there’s two more. Steve nods, doesn’t bring up anything Clint maybe doesn’t want to yank painfully into the light any more than he already has done.

“It was a few days before my eighteenth birthday. I can’t remember. Less than a week. They dumped me on the roadside when they hightailed it out of Peoria, the last night before we were due to leave anyhow. Not far out of the city, I – I got no idea. I was a mess.”

Clint picks at the edge of the leather with a rueful grin, and if Steve hadn’t seen a couple of them himself, he’d never guess he still had scars from it, by the look on his face.

Steve turns on his side, just enough to watch Clint’s face for clues. There’s almost always as much to be found trapped in Clint’s eyes as there is coming out of his mouth.

When he speaks again, it’s with the hesitancy of lacking practice. This is not a story he has told often.

“I’d probably’ve died there, if a car hadn’t stopped. This woman got out – a _lady. _I mean, a proper _lady. _She was elegant. Older. All sweet talk and lipstick and perfume, you know? And she had these shoes, these white shoes. She helped roll me over, and my hand got on her shoe and it was covered in blood and, _God. _I just remember thinking: _Shit. _How do I ever pay her back for ruining her shoes?”

As if driven by his own story, Clint undoes the leather, and hands it right on over to Steve for better inspection. It’s dark and ornate, beautifully designed. And old, well-worn, loved. It looks almost more like a family heirloom of generations.

Clint, still looking at the strap, wearing wistful like he rarely does, is still smiling.

“She got her husband to help. Or, someone. There was a man. I’m sure of it. I think I just kept saying _No hospital, no hospital. _I was terrified. They put me in the backseat, took me to a motel and, I don’t know. Helped me. I honestly don’t remember most of it. Just her goddamn shoes, with my blood on them, and I tried to apologise but she didn’t seem to care. I’d never seen that before. Not – like, she was all dolled up, and I was this mostly-dead carnie, but she took me to a safe place, helped patch me up and gave me some money. Nobody had ever done that, before. Most folks who came to see the shows, they’d sooner have sped up the car than stopped it. You know?

“When I woke up, she was still there. Said the room was bought for the week, and I could stay as long as I wanted, and I should take care of myself. Fucking _saint. _Maybe she was Red Cross or something and I just didn’t notice. Then she gave me that.”

He gestures to the strap that Steve is running through his fingers absently, his own short breaths a second-hand thought to Clint’s half-grin.

“Tied it around my arm and told me to always keep it on. Said it was for protection, for luck. It would keep me safe. And, I mean, I’d just spent years living in a circus with all kinds of superstitious folk. I’d learned not to turn down protective charms, or dismiss them. Stupid, maybe. But I always felt safer, wearing it. Even once I was with SHIELD, and I had actual _people _looking out for me. I still never felt quite right unless I was wearing that strap.”

Steve traces the symbols, overlapping shapes, some of them like letters, a couple of them reasonably similar to zodiac signs. They could mean anything, could be curses for all he knows.

Clint’s right, though. However stupid, there’s something safe about a promise like that.

_For protection, for luck._

Clint scrunches his mouth up, trapping any remaining words inside. He looks a little embarrassed as he plucks the leather back from Steve’s hands and ties it tight again, just below his elbow.

Guardian angel indeed.

“You get her name?”

Clint shakes his head.

“Got nothing. Or if I did, I was too out of it to remember. Just a charm bracelet and an overwhelming need to balance the books for the rest of my goddamn life.”

It is, in its own way, a better insight than Steve would have dared asked for, if he’d realised. He’d thought, by Clint’s occasional defensiveness, it had come from his brother, or another family member. Or if not, then maybe even Phil Coulson.

A stranger seems incongruous, and entirely right. For as long as Steve’s known him, Clint has been more or less guided by his own sense of responsibility, and Steve has tried to fit that into any number of assumptions to no avail. Paying back the universe for a guardian angel, though. That seems like a suitably impossible code for a man like Hawkeye to be living his life by.

“I think you’ve more than paid your dues, Clint,” he says, and Clint rolls his eyes as he returns to his laptop.

“Yeah, yeah. Knight me, won’t you?” he mutters through a smirk.

Steve reaches out one arm, stiff at the shoulder but otherwise healed, and taps his flat hand on one of Clint’s shoulders, then the other.

Clint laughs and smacks his hand away.

His smile doesn’t quite fade for the rest of the day.

*

_(Sometimes, it feels like I didn’t know him at all, _Steve says, and Natasha’s eyes are steel. He looks away, a little ashamed, a lot afraid. They’ve wasted so much time.)

*

In the thirties, Bucky took his punches same way he took medicine, the few times they had the cash for it. Necessary evils. Braced his cheekbone for bruising in survival mode, locked his jaw against breaking by sheer force of his God given determination. Learned it from the boys down the street, from the thugs, from his father.

Eighty years later, frantic, wild, much the same.

Yet, not.

*

There was a fragment of a moment, in 1945, when Steve Rogers clung to the side of a train.

The clothes on his back told a different tale, sang a different song.

Captain America, the red-white-blue of those comic strips back home. The man who punched Hitler in the face, day after day. The man with clean hands and a winning smile. The man who looked like he could hit a home run with one hand while signing peace treaties with the other.

It wasn’t Captain America clinging to the side of that train, though. It was Steve Rogers.

Steve Rogers, nose rebroken four times, or maybe it was five. Who coughed out his laughs treacherous and scrunched up his fists every time a hand was offered out to pull him up from the dirt, who had ‘em all on the ropes, who kept all the stupid with him while his best friend, the _best _of him, went off into dangers unknown alone.

Steve Rogers, clinging to the side of a train, wearing a hero’s costume, biting broken toothed into his frostbitten knuckles, crying lungfuls that would have killed him five years ago.

In his mind’s eye, miles below, behind, the shattered body of his best self, never to be seen again. Eaten up by snow where not even the scavengers could find him.

If only.

If fucking only.

*

_Half the universe, Brucie, _Tony says hoarsely. _What’s one more?_

*

_Take care of yourself, Captain America, _the stranger named Kate said before stalking out of the increasingly decrepit apartment, carrying with her all the air of never-to-be-seen-again.

The next time Steve sees her, she’s pure steel. Hollow eyes and a scar on her chin, with a bow slung over her back and malice in her mouth.

*

“We’ll need the whole team,” someone says.

Scott, Natasha, himself. Someone, or perhaps all of them.

There is this thing growing between them, that tastes dangerous. Hope. A chance.

Tony shows up and Steve wants to grab him tight, wants to never ever let go of him, wants to never be so far away from him again. This brilliant, terrible man with his unparalleled mind and a chasm within him. He’s many things Steve hates, and yet everything he admires.

They gather. The team. The gang. They congregate sacred and Rhodey says he’s on his way and Carol says she’ll come back when she can and Bruce says he’s going to fetch Thor and Natasha says, quietly, _I’m going after her._

“Where’s incy wincy?” Tony asks shrewdly as he presents several identical wristbands with a timelocked GPS in each of their tiny faces and Scott looks to Steve for an answer.

“She’s gone to get Hawkeye,” he says, and if it’s a little cruel, well, that’s the truth of this world, this universe. It has been forged cruelly.

Tony flinches full-bodied and Scott looks up from his sandwich with his mouth hanging open.

“That’s not funny, Captain,” Tony replies with flashing eyes.

“Not him,” Steve says with a one-shouldered shrug.

“There’s another?” Tony says, some measure of faux horror reminiscent of those earliest days, when they’d have made a terrible joke about the implosion of the universe, about clones or multiverses or how the world couldn’t possibly withstand _two _of that outrageous, ridiculous man.

Steve plasters a smile on, easy as the posters.

“I only met her a couple of times. She and Clint were close. They co-owned a dog. I think she was something like a little sister to him. But Natasha trusts her, so.”

Steve doesn’t mean to obfuscate Tony’s reaction by just throwing lots of information at him, if only because Tony’s an old hat at that trick. It happens anyway. The truth falls out of him fast, as if making up for the lack of it he once offered the man standing before him now.

Tony blinks rapidly, processing, calculating, measuring. It all glows like a thousand watt light bulb above his head.

“Hawkeye’s a girl?” he asks, and that’s definitely one for the oldest versions of themselves, back when they had people around to laugh at it.

Steve feels his grin deepen painfully in his face, despite himself. He nods and almost laughs. He senses Scott looking nervously between them, as if he’s expecting them to start brawling any moment now.

Tony claps Steve on the arm as he walks past him. It’s rough contact, brusque, and warm.

Tony, to a tee.

*

In Wakanda, in a bed in a hospital, after Tony’s walked out and Sam has followed him.

Sergeant James Barnes, one arm and a shuddering mouth. He looks at Steve, crumpled, like an aging, withered tree.

Back then, back when. _Did it hurt? _The first thing he asked, the first person to ask who wasn’t there, of course, of course, why wouldn’t he? Steve’s welfare, his wellbeing, Buck’s first instinct born and bred.

Now, in Wakanda.

Bucky’s eyes are wet and he grasps at Steve’s blankets with a hand strong enough to break bones, strong like Steve’s own, they are a matched pair, always have been, in some way or another. He stares accusingly at Steve, hurt, hurting like Steve can’t heal.

Steve grasps at the air for words, for solace. He wants to offer something, would sacrifice any blood he has left to let upon an abattoir if it could bring Bucky comfort now. Bucky, who was big, and brave, and there, all the times Steve needed him and most of the times he didn’t, right up until that moment, screech of wheels on a frostbite track.

Bucky looks at him with those eyes, blue like the sea, wet like it, too.

Opens that shuddering mouth and says with deliberate slowness: “They slashed out his eyes.”

It sounds worse from him than it had coming from Tony, worse for the rust of a hundred years of living, worse for the way he says it, deadlike, toneless, not a question, not a confirmation. Shock.

He hadn’t known.

He hadn’t known until Tony said it, God above, God below, what Steve wouldn’t give up right now this very instant to take it back from Bucky’s imagination, pluck it out of his head. If he could forget anything then surely, surely kindest would be to forget that thought, that knowledge.

Steve’s angry, suddenly. Angry all over again. Angry at Tony, his cruel tongue. Angry at himself, reactive, like a spark to gasoline. Angry at Clint for dying, for not dying quicker.

“He loved you.”

It falls out of him, tumbles, wrenches itself from his teeth. That truth, that undeniable anchor that dragged Hawkeye through days of suffering that should have been hours.

And Bucky, now, a snarl of brambles in his face.

“Fuck you, Steve.”

He stands up, hot as a rash, caught between leaving and staying, hovering like it’s 1933 and the humidity’s the killer in Steve’s lungs. Steve ducks his head, doesn’t apologise, doesn’t say it again.

It hangs over them like a bad omen, a dead man’s love.

Bucky sits back down.

He puts his hand on the back of Steve’s neck, to the slope of his shoulder, squeezing, like it’s 1942.

*

_That guy outside right now, _Clint said, that day, the morning after. Standing in his cluttered kitchen, soft and sore from yesterday’s verbal beating. He’s smiling, somehow, anyway.

Bucky turns around and when he sees them watching, he smiles with one shy half of his mouth.

*

This is how the conversation goes.

Steve rehearses it a few times in his head and in his heart. The words bounce about in the cavity of his chest, leaving bruises that ache for days. He’s thought about it, on and off and on again, ever since Scott first suggested it.

They are standing in one of the communal spaces, late on a sleepless night.

Tony is standing up, too agitated to settle. He brushes up and down and all around, fiddling with things that do not require further fiddling.

Bruce is sitting on a sofa.

Steve fell asleep on that sofa eight years ago, with Clint Barton’s feet in his lap. He pretends not to remember, or at least not to notice.

Steve is sitting on the armchair.

He says it first. Double dare with a cherry on top.

“Could we bring back others?”

He can’t possibly be the first one to think it, except for how Bruce and Tony look at him. Surprise in the whites of their eyes, the slack circles of their mouths. They are astounded by Steve’s words, the boldness of them, the danger. In another universe maybe, they are the three most dangerous creatures alive.

Not this one, though. This one has seen far worse than them by now.

“To what end?” Bruce asks. “We make exceptions for one, two, ten?”

“I just thought –”

“I know what you thought, Steve. So, we bring back Hawkeye. And who else, exactly? Should we bring back Wanda’s brother, too? What about Thor’s? Maybe we should bring back every other person who died a wrongful death because we feel bad about it.”

There’s a bladed irony to how, in all their years of friendship, Steve’s not actually ever seen Bruce angry before, before Bruce angry was an entire _Other Guy. _Now, though. Bruce, green and large, the unhappiest of happy compromises. He’s frowning, accusing, his voice hardened by an emotion that used to frighten and fuel him.

“Bruce,” Tony says but he’s got no follow-up.

Steve knows what he wants to say.

_You weren’t there. You don’t know. You didn’t see._

Steve remembers it.

It’s come back to him in cruel fits of restive sleep over the years, all the shards of memories he could not find in waking moments. He knows exactly how it happened. He had watched it, helpless. And later, standing in the morgue until his skin was uniform blue. Bucky striding in, blasting open the door, frantic wild thing, his eyes ablaze, _How fucking dare you do this to me._

Bruce wasn’t there, doesn’t know, didn’t see.

Steve carried Pietro Maximoff’s bullet-riddled body onto a Helicarrier and he’ll remember the precise weight of that boy until the end of his days, and still, Steve would carry that weight a whole lot easier than he ever will the memory of that bunker, that knife, that scream. Maybe he won’t be able to look Wanda in the eye, should this miracle-stunt actually come to something real. All the same.

He’ll take it. He’ll pay that price.

There’s a four-star rated biography of Steven G. Rogers that calls him a selfless man, and Steve, it used to make him laugh, but these days the very notion makes him want to burn down libraries. Some days, he’s sure he’s the most selfish man that ever lived.

When he looks at Tony, he sees himself reflected back, a haunting of an argument they’ve neither of them healed from.

“What, Tony?” Bruce asks, quiet, exhausted.

“We can’t bring everyone back,” Tony says, says the way he might say a wrong equation, as if it hurts him to voice. “But this. This one thing. We could do it.”

“We couldn’t,” Bruce says firmly, obedient to the universe, despite how the universe has failed him, time and time again. Not for the first time, Steve wonders how exactly things might have gone, if it had been the right serum pumped into his veins.

“Tony,” Steve says.

Tony wets his lips. He folds his arms across his chest. It’s a move that might once have been to hide his arc reactor, but now it’s just the empty gesture of a father missing his daughter.

“Why couldn’t we?” Tony asks. The motto he has lived by, the one his father lived by, too. There wouldn’t be an Iron Man without that motto. There wouldn’t be a Captain America, either. “Half the universe, Brucie. What’s one more?”

Bruce hangs his head and mumbles something not even Steve’s ears catch.

“We need to get the stones first, anyhow,” Steve points out.

“Yeah, right, exactly,” Tony adds, flippant, ferrety. “Piece of cake. Get the stones. Bring everyone back. Kick Barton’s ass for dying on us.”

A choking laugh rips painfully out of Steve’s mouth, like teeth torn from his gums. Tony’s face is pale and Bruce shakes his head, and Steve puts his palms over his eyes to hide his tears.

Above them, so quiet he is sure that he alone can sense it, Steve hears the knock of something moving through the vents. Someone. He knows exactly who.

*

_See you in a minute, _she says with a flash of the person she was, back when all the pieces of her soul were still alive.

*

Steve returns to the Avengers Base, when the world is twice as big and half as small. There are so many empty spaces. Empty laboratories. Empty training rooms. Empty offices.

He walks down the southeast corridor, Lucky knocking against his legs as he plods quietly beside him.

It’s not as if it had been unusual, per say, for the Base to be quiet, all but silent, and so it’s almost possible for Steve to pretend he’s walking through a mirror darkly, into a time before blame, before Thanos. The goddamn gorgeous dog that walks beside him, golden blessing, guardian.

He takes a right his feet remember well, followed quickly by a left he’s never taken before. He finds himself in a hastily pulled apart office. Rifled desk, shelves on the walls empty but for random books on mathematics and electrical engineering and Southeast Asian cookery.

There’s a south-facing window, so big that the entire room is flooded with sunshine creeping closer towards dusk. Orange, silky, and the carpet must be hot and cosy because Lucky curls up in the middle of the floor with a quiet _whuff._

Steve grins, stooping just low enough to brush his fingers over the dog’s ears as he steps over him.

Without much thinking on it, he pulls open the top drawer of the desk, sleek black and noiseless.

Inside, a book on basic geometric progression. Steve picks it up, flicking idly through. Inside the front cover, in untidy green biro:

_Rhodester, see me after class._

It’s followed by a very long, complex looking equation that perhaps Bruce would be able to comprehend. Steve skims the pages before dropping it back in the drawer and shutting it.

The second drawer contains an unopened back of colouring pencils and what seems to be a very tangled, impossibly long paperclip chain.

Lucky lets out a grumbling yip as he rolls over in the butter of the sun. Steve smiles, slumping into the desk chair and looking about the room. From this angle, he can stare directly out of the window, all way into the crisp, apple skin horizon. It’s so, so easy, already, to forget, to pretend.

Steve looks to his right, to the sparse shelves. He sees between two heavy manuals a thin book with wonky pages falling out.

As normal as this quietude is, Steve’s never enjoyed it.

Silence, it’s a constant companion of loneliness, the unshakeable shadow attached to the feet of death.

His world, _Steve’s _world, it was so noisy. Brooklyn, crammed with twice as many people as the street space provided for. His mother singing, the Barnes girls yelling, the yapping of old Mr O’Connor’s mutt every time the moon showed her face.

And then? Well, the army isn’t exactly known for its solitude. Neither is war.

Steve’s sure he only ever knew two silences in the whole of the twentieth century: the pervading, dusty emptiness of that blown out London pub after Bucky’s fall, and the popping water freeze of the Arctic Ocean as it swallowed him whole.

Steve stares at the shelf in this forgotten, ransacked office until curiosity yanks him from his stupor, and he stands up to pull the pages free from between the manuals. It’s a thin notebook, with a blank royal blue cover. Inside, scribblings, loose pages, a pamphlet for a fair of some kind, and then. Then.

He pulls them out, two heavier rectangles. The quality of the paper is good, the print of the photographs perfect.

The first is Tony standing in his lab, wearing a suit positively covered with grease marks, sleeves rolled up with his tie thrown haphazardly over his shoulder. His entire face is creased into a wide, wondrous smile.

Beside him, a kid, slender, grinning, smudged with grease too and holding both hands out as if to block Tony’s view from whatever they’re working on. Steve doesn’t know the boy, never saw his face in person but they’ve met.

_Queens, _he’d said, and he sounded it.

The way he looks at Tony in this photo clutched between Steve’s fingers now, it’s hard to imagine the kid as anything but whole, but alive. Steve feels it secondhand, thirdhand, the pang. This. This is what Tony has lost, and Steve feels it keenly for him.

Steve puts it back in the notebook and looks at the second photo. Older, less defined in its print and infinitely precious. Steve has to take care not to hold it too tightly in his trembling hands and his eyes burn painfully with a sting he hasn’t felt, hasn’t allowed himself to feel, in a long time now.

Tony can’t be more than seven years old here, fat clinging to his bunched cheeks, already wearing the glow of his father’s youthful mischief. He’s holding a pristinely folded paper airplane in one hand, while the other is clutching the loose curls of the woman whose lap he’s perched in.

Her smile, pinched with the humour Steve recognises from thirty years before this photo was taken. Her hair still dark, longer than Steve ever saw it, wearing that bright lipstick, and age is barely an afterthought against the creases of her eyes.

Peggy’s arms are around the boy in her lap, clutching him motherly, and Steve thinks about that, for as long as he dares, for as long as he can before he’d have to rip his heart from his chest to withstand it. Thinks about Howard, meeting someone he’ll slow down for, telling Peggy all about her. Telling Steve, too, if he’d been there to hear it.

He thinks about a late night phone call that never happened – _Steve, I’ve got a son, a little boy, his name is Anthony._

Steve would’ve congratulated him, would’ve told him how wonderful that was, how much he was looking forward to meeting him. Then he’d put the phone down and turn back over on his pillows, to Peggy, his nose to her cheek, his mouth to her mouth.

Maybe he’d ask her if she wanted to make a baby, too, or maybe they’d already have one, or two, or three by then.

There will never be a time or a place, not even a moment, where Steve will be able to explain it to Tony. How _sorry _he is that Tony lost the things he lost, was denied the things he was denied. But this, here in Steve’s hands, a colourful rectangle of a moment he’d give up the other half of the world to know.

He wants to be there, to exist inside this photograph, even if it meant being dust right now.

He _wants._

Steve tucks the photo back inside the notebook alongside the other. He should call Pepper, tell her, ask her for an address. He should post this to them, Tony will surely want them, these precious, precious moments. They are important now, all the more so for being gone.

Something knocks against his leg and Steve flinches, looking down to see Lucky pressed against him. He’s staring up at him, tail thumping, his smiling mouth open wide.

Steve’s fingers drift down to his ears to scratch and Lucky shakes his head in response.

Steve snorts fondly. He clutches the notebook tight, says, _“Come on, boy,” _and walks back out into the corridor, leaving the door open. Lucky follows at an eager trot all the way back to the rooms Steve occupies maybe once or twice a week at most.

He keeps the notebook, and its contents.

*

A year later. A phone call, in the early hours of dawn. It wakes Steve up and when he sees the name his breath scratches him, sharp oxygen and fear.

_I have a daughter, _Tony says, and he sounds just the way Steve imagined Howard would have, had everything been different. _Morgan._

_That’s really wonderful, Tony, _Steve tells him, because it’s true.

On both accounts, the real and the imagined, it’s so very, very true.

*

Natasha leaves in the dead of night and returns two days later with a Hawkeye.

_Not him, _Steve had said to Tony, and to himself.

Kate’s got a dark, long-healed scar on her eyebrow that wasn’t there before, matching the one on her chin. She does a cursory sweep of the crowd as if Steve doesn’t know exactly who she’s looking for, her eyes tight, withdrawn, hooded.

They buried Lucky in some of the further out gardens of the Base, where Wanda used to practice her magic, and where Lucky best liked to nap in the afternoons. Steve resolves to take her there, if she’ll allow him the time to offer.

“I’m Kate,” she says, bold, unimpressed by the motley crew she’s been shanghaied into.

Natasha behind her, stoic as oyster stone against the sea.

“Is that a bow and arrow?” the raccoon asks. _Rocket, _Steve reminds himself. He really needs to stop thinking of him as _the raccoon._

“It is,” Kate retorts, haughty and stupidly unperturbed to say she’s talking to a raccoon for what must the first time.

(Surely, surely it’s the first time. Natasha must have warned her.)

“Ha,” Rocket says, too loud and too amused, but why wouldn’t he? There’s nothing painful in that for him, no hidden barbs to snag his emotions on. “OK. Fine. I mean, we’ve got every other weirdo on this backwards planet. Why not one more?”

Kate, for all intents and purposes, seems to smirk.

“Grateful for your approval, Possum,” she responds, before slinging off her gear and proceeding to ignore Rocket’s spluttering.

“Has Natasha filled you in on what we’re gonna do?” Steve asks.

Kate’s eyes barely find him.

“She sure has, El Capitano.”

The past five years haven’t been kind to her. They’ve stripped some of the slyness from her words, leaving them colder. Her hair is short, too short to be pulled back the way he remembers it, and her cheekbones are cutting through her skin.

Natasha shepherds her expertly away from the crowd, towards the living quarters, and for an unkind moment Steve wonders if Natasha’s going to give her Clint’s old room. When he catches Tony’s suspiciously quiet look, he realises he’s not the only one thinking it.

*

Before the fall of SHIELD, when she’s getting the bullet wound in her shoulder stitched up, Natasha keeps a death grip on her thin gold necklace. Steve’s seen it before, seen it so many times he’s not actually _looked _at it.

When she lets go, fingers white and bloodless, there’s the mark of an arrow imprinted in her palm.

*

Steve meets a woman one day, at one of the group sessions.

Roland is taking the lead. They rarely attend each other’s sessions. Why bother? They’re only repeating each other’s words back to one another, boomerang comfort.

It’s a Thursday, blanket clouds quilting the sky. Steve finds himself sitting next to a tidily dressed woman who introduces herself as Marion.

_My friends called me Maid, _she tells him, and it takes him a moment to piece the puzzle together. Then he laughs, sad, apologetic, because there’s a whole lot of past tense in that sentence. There’s a whole lot of past tense getting bandied around these days by everyone.

Marion is thirty-two years old. She has found herself abruptly alone in a world that had very few people in it to begin with.

_It’s hard to find someone with shared life experience, _Steve had solemnly joked to Natasha once.

It feels a bit like he’d tempted fate with that one. These days, everybody’s got shared life experience.

After the meeting, Marion, who had not once given the slightest indication she knows or cares who Steve is, tells him:

“My mom died in the Battle of New York. You know. 2012. When the aliens came.”

Before Steve can formulate a stuttering apology, she looks at him, her dark hair falling into her green eyes.

“Don’t,” she tells him. “A whole lot more people would have died without the Avengers. You can’t save everybody.”

Steve looks at her, her long thin nose, the freckle at the corner of her mouth, her thick eyelashes, a scar in her eyebrow that looks like a healed piercing.

“That’s a very generous way of looking at it,” he tells her.

Marion smiles indulgently, secretly. It’s an expression that changes her whole face.

“I’ve had plenty of time to think my ugly thoughts,” she tells him. “It’s not what I’d have said to you if we’d met a couple months after it happened. But that was then. It’s different now. Not just because of the vanishing. Time, it can be kind like that, if you let it.”

Steve knows a little of that himself. He’s felt the decay of bitterness, broken down by time. It’s the same way the sea breaks down cliffs. It’s arduous and natural, can be forestalled, denied, but never truly defeated.

“Can I buy you a coffee?” Marion asks, and it’s only then Steve realises he hasn’t responded.

He’s startled to find himself standing in the street, rain speckling their hair and shoulders. He smiles.

“Only if I can buy you one, too,” he tells her.

“I’ll take that deal,” Marion replies, and they hurry together out of the chilly air, into a steaming coffee shop nearby.

*

It doesn’t last.

Nothing ever does, never did, certainly not anymore.

It’s good for a little while, though. They share life experience. Enough. Too much.

Steve knows he’ll never match up to the photo frame on Marion’s dresser, just as Marion knows she’ll never match up to the trinket in Steve’s jacket pocket.

That’s the bulk of affection, in the aftermath of Thanos’ mayhem. Palliative tenderness shared between people immune to the placebo of others’ love.

*

They gather. They congregate.

A new and desolate crew, Avengers too burdened, ghost lives unlived.

Steve’s going with Tony, and with Scott, and Bruce. He reads Scott’s nerves, worried to be stuck with two men he’s only ever known to be at odds with one another.

Scott doesn’t know anything other than Steve And Tony, has never met _Steve and Tony. _Never saw the bond before it broke.

Bruce is worried, too. It’s not the same as Scott, though. He’s the opposite, really. He never saw the break. Even if he’s been told, he didn’t see it. That’s why. That’s _why._

So, they gather. They congregate.

“See you in a minute,” Natasha tells him, her hair plaited red to blonde, her eyes alight, and she’s holding her necklace through the gap of her helmet so tight, he knows the imprint that will be pressed into her glove when she lets go.

Beside her, Kate, hungry, angry, eager. She nods at Steve, and it might be the first time she’s really looked at him since she got here.

Steve nods back. Her smile, faint, real.

_Thank you, _Kate mouths at him, and signs with one quick hand.

*

She doesn’t come back.

*

Bucky’s at work, the day Steve’s mom dies.

He’s got a gig down at the docks. Hard labour, and he cracks jokes about doing time for all the crimes he’s going to commit in the future. His hands get rough quickly and his neck burns in the summer, his body tanning and peeling.

Steve doesn’t know, yet, that eighty years down the line, he’ll live in a world where he could’ve picked up a cell phone and called Bucky, then and there. Begged him to come back, to be there, to not make him sit here alone while his mother’s body is carted off, bruised with illness, her mouth full of clotted blood.

That’s not an option, the day Steve’s mom dies. It’s not even something he can comprehend.

The day Steve’s mom dies, he’s alone, and she is dead, and Bucky is at work.

Couldn’t have come anyway, even if Steve could have called him. Jobs were precious, worth more than the money paid for them. Bucky hadn’t a good word to say about the docks, but he went back every day and never bothered pretending he wasn’t going to keep going for as long as they’d keep him.

Steve lets them take his mom away, knows he has to take care of things, knows he has stuff to do, people to talk to. Funny, maybe, for all he’s been preparing himself for this moment, it’s only now he realises she’s going to need to be buried somewhere.

Steve sits in his mom’s room. Death rot, sickly sweet nausea permeating the apartment. He puts his palms over his temples, fingers digging into his scalp.

He doesn’t remember a lot of that day. Thinks perhaps he should remember every detail, it’s an _important day, _he should remember. It’s a blur, a pasty blur of badly washed out emotions, the bleed of colour on weak paper. Stabs of emotional jags like the puncture of a pencil through the page.

“Steve?” a voice says, soft as feathers, a shadow in the doorway.

He looks up.

Becca Barnes steps further into the room, hair falling in her face, a face so like her mother’s and Steve’s breath catches in his chest. He looks down again. Listens to her moving around, hears her leave and come back in the space of a few minutes.

When she returns, she’s carrying a wafer-thin blanket that she puts around his shoulders and holds until he takes it at the corners with loose fingers. Steve looks at her.

She doesn’t look much like her big brother at all. She’s all her mother, while Bucky’s the spitting image of his father, however hard he’s tried to outgrow it.

Steve grimaces when Becca takes hold of his hands, crouching near him.

“Do you need me to come with you?” she asks.

Steve shakes his head, pulling the blanket corners together in front of his throat.

“OK,” Becca murmurs, nodding. “Let’s go.”

Steve almost smiles as he lets her pull him up. If he was a whole lot more sensible, he’d fall in love with her and beg Bucky’s approval, because she’s wonderful, she’s brave and quick-witted and infinitely kind. She is her mother’s daughter, in her face and her voice and in the ill-refined grace of her movements.

More than that, though, in her manner and her words and her strength, she is her brother’s sister.

She stays with him all day, until Bucky gets back from work.

*

They travel through time.

It’s maddening, exhilarating, terrible. They bend the laws of the universe until they snap, splintering themselves along the way.

Steve feels like he’s holding his breath under twenty feet of ice.

He sees them, the as-of-yet Avengers. Fury’s Initiative, his pride and joy coveted. They’re there, all of them. Victorious, together. A team, already battered by hardships and yet, so innocent, so unaware of all the things yet to come, the wonderful and the awful. They are so unknowing in the aftermath of this first hurdle.

He sees himself, and he wonders how he ever stood up under the weight of himself. Sees the sharpness of his own movements, hears the straining reach for normalcy in his voice. He is not Steve Rogers, here. He is Captain America, and it chills him in his bones.

He sees Natasha, silky, amused, holding in her hands five times as many secrets as her wondrous strength can bear. The Hulk, not yet at peace with the body and mind he shares. Thor, with a brother alive, a god who hasn’t found his own peace, either.

He sees Tony Stark, wickedly defensive, coasting on the adrenaline that will slowly poison his choices for years to come, twisting good intentions towards the manic, the desperate.

He sees Clint Barton, one who is still hours away from discovering the death of his handler, his friend.

Steve shakes off the dew of his resting fear before it can freeze him.

He gets the mind stone.

*

They travel through time. Further on, further still.

Peggy is unchanged. Familiar, in the memory of her mouth against Steve’s. In the photo that hasn’t been taken yet, sitting in a drawer in Steve’s room, in a base that hasn’t been built yet.

*

_See you in a minute, _she says, and a minute later she comes back alone.

*

“There’s something wrong with Natasha,” Bruce says very quietly into Steve’s ear as they watch Tony and Rocket bicker over the mechanics of magic.

Steve feels like he’s had his insides scooped out of him with a spoon.

“She just lost another friend,” he retorts as calmly as he can. “One it seems she won’t get back.”

At the ensuing silence, he turns his head to see Bruce shaking his own in small, jerky movements. Bruce’s gaze darts to Tony, then to Natasha, then back to Steve. He raises his hand to toy with the open collar of his stretched-out shirt, large green fingers twitching.

“She lost something else, too,” Bruce says.

Steve dares another glance at Natasha, who is standing alone beside the raised portal dais with her arms folded across her chest, wearing the contained rage of the Black Widow. For a moment, Bruce’s words are incomprehensible.

And then. And _then._

He looks at her bare throat.

“Where’s her necklace?” Steve asks, turning back.

Bruce’s eyes, sad and worried.

*

“No, _left, _I said left! I mean, um, your other left! My left!”

Clint waves his arms frantically, winded by his own laughter as he bends his knees and points to his left, which is very much Steve’s _right, _while Steve pivots on his heel with half a tractor under his shoulder.

“You know, Hawkeye,” Steve grunts. While it’s not exactly the _heaviest _thing he’s ever lifted, he’s not exactly taking a Sunday stroll here. “I’m starting to think you only like having me here for the free labour.”

Clint smacks the fender to bring him to a halt, still chuckling when Steve lets go with a creak of old metal.

“Free?” Clint scoffs, darting around to check the other side of the half-scrapped machinery. “Do you _know _how much you eat, Rogers? I’d have a cheaper time of it hiring a workforce. Hey, could you budge it a couple more inches?”

Steve levels Clint with a glower that doesn’t really sit properly over his smirk, plants the flat of his foot against the bulk of the tractor and shoves as hard as he can. It squeaks two more inches sideways into place.

“Why do you still have them?” he asks, clapping the dust from his hands and looking up and down the length of the barn.

Even as he asks it, he realises.

There’s a decent labyrinth to the barn, now, even better than there had been the first time he came here, after the Avengers’ first big clash against Ultron. Without the knowhow, it would be a miracle for someone to find their way down into the bunker below.

Clint doesn’t mention any of this, though. He picks up a bottle of water to toss to Steve, sips one of his own and leans jauntily against a muddy tractor wheel.

“It’s a farm. There should be farm things. Anyhow, it’s not like I can sell them for shit. They’re all just spare parts.”

He smiles innocently, without even a hint of irony as sweat shines on his brow, spiking up his hair and running down his cheeks. Summer is fast approaching, it’s not yet midday and the air is thick with cricket song and stifling heat.

“Bucky not one for heavy lifting?” Steve asks.

Turns out, it’s just as much fun ribbing the punk, even when he isn’t within earshot.

Clint laughs, the sound hitting the rafters hard, bouncing back with a ring. He puts down the water bottle, frowning up at the ceiling before toeing off his shoes and socks, bending his knees and leaping up to a low-hanging beam, chasing after some poorly fixed rope in the joists.

His voice is a little more strained as he replies,

“Bucky’s expertise as a handy-man is even more fickle than his appetite. You’re just more easily duped into manual labour, Steven.”

Steve chuckles, though there’s not much humour in the truth of Clint’s words. He can’t deny he really doesn’t mind being asked to do all manner of heavy-handed tasks, which he knows enough about himself to acknowledge comes from the first two and a half decades spent being told he physically _can’t _do much more complex than walk and talk at the same time.

Even now, it feels like a victory over his former frailty, every mile he runs.

It’s different for Bucky, he thinks. Bucky was working harder than he or his body wanted long before he should have been. There’s no pleasure in heavy lifting for Bucky, except maybe in the choice of it, now.

As for Clint’s quip about his appetite, well. Steve’s seen that for himself. Seen Buck pack away as much as Steve one day, and barely touch the marmalade toast Clint shoves under his nose the next.

It’s a process, Steve reminds himself, constantly, and he thinks possibly Clint does, too.

Clint swings himself up to where the rope is hanging while Steve watches, doesn’t bother shouting about splinters in his bare feet because he won’t hear the end of it all day if he does. He drinks the water, standing in the open doorway as the sun punishes the parched ground. He can just about hear the sounds of a radio playing inside the house, when the wind catches it right.

Looking up from the ground as Clint perches on the balls of his feet, looping the rope length back up towards its rightful, questionably chosen place in a hook, Steve catches sight of a mark on the bottom of Clint’s left heel. It’s dark, small, and it’s only then he realises he’s seen it before, usually during sparring sessions. Only, it’s so insignificantly small that Steve’s never really thought on it being an actual _mark._

Peering with closer intent as Clint teeters on the beam, Steve tries to make it out.

It looks rather like…

“Clint, why is there a spider tattooed on your foot?”

“Wha-shit!”

Distracted, as if trying to look for himself in surprise, Clint ducks down and proceeds to topple right off the beam.

“Clint!” Steve shouts, his heart shrinking with shock inside his chest as he leaps forwards to catch the lolloping limbs, but there’s no need.

Clint catches himself, his hands where his feet had been only a moment before, his bare feet dangling now a good six feet closer to Steve than before. He kicks lazily, laughing with dry relief, as if there’d been any chance at all he’d actually hit the ground.

Instead of offering help that will no doubt be rejected with snippy pride, Steve inspects the tattoo again.

“I thought SHIELD protocol banned tattoos on active agents?” he asks, and he senses Clint rolling his eyes from above.

In all fairness, SHIELD doesn’t exist anymore, but it seems unlikely Clint had this done in the past couple of years.

“In theory,” Clint replies with a snort that shows what he thinks of that. He swings once, twice, then lands far too gracefully on the floor to Steve’s right.

He picks up his foot to stand flamingo, showing the tiny black spider.

“I was supposed to get it removed after the op was over, but. I kind of liked it. It’s Tasha’s _‘signature’._”

He gives the word _signature _a bunny eared quote effect with one hand, although that seems incorrect because Steve’s pretty sure it _is _her signature.

“Why do you have Natasha’s signature on your foot?” he asks, simultaneously desperate and reluctant to hear the answer.

Clint starts putting his socks and shoes back on, wobbling on one foot awkwardly, as if he’s displayed too artful a sense of balance for one day and would like to rest from his circus trained precision.

“Well, when she _‘killed’ _me,” he replies with another of those bunny quotes, “she had to mark me up to show it was her. As if marks from her bites weren’t enough. They freaking _sting, _man. Zero out of ten, would not go again. We were taking down a less-than-inactive Red Room cell. Anyway, I liked it. Tasha thinks I’m an idiot, but, you know. Nothing new there.”

Steve drains his water bottle as Clint returns to standing on two feet, picks up his own water and gestures towards the house.

“Thanks for the super-lifting,” Clint says, putting an abrupt end to the conversation with good-natured ease.

“No problem,” Steve replies without pressing the matter further, following him half a step behind towards the house.

He wants to ask if that means Natasha has Clint’s _‘signature’ _tattooed on her heel, too, just to be facetious, knowing full well she won’t, when the truth occurs to him and he bites the question back.

No, she doesn’t have Clint’s mark tattooed on her heel, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t wear it. He’s seen it, glinting gold around her neck. On display, in a way not a single other truth is.

It’s at complete odds with everything else about her.

Steve doesn’t bring it up. He simply follows Clint back into the house, where all the windows are open and the hardwood floors are warm and Bucky is rearranging the furniture with the same flustered energy that he used to expend getting into pointless arguments with the guys Becca stepped out with for a dance.

The next day, Natasha swings by ahead of a mission they’re due to go on in two days’ time.

Steve steals too many looks at the chain tucked under her shirt. He knows, because she frowns at him curiously.

He just smiles back.

*

“Where’s her necklace?” Steve asks, yet even as he says it he thinks: _I know. I know where it is._

*

“Sacrifice,” Steve says to the corner of the kitchen they’ve holed themselves up in.

He’s glad, in a way, that Tony and Rocket disagree with each other so much. It seems to have kept Tony from noticing what Bruce clocked so fast, what Steve has found himself so readily caught up on.

Bruce is making _coffee, _and Steve wants to point out that there are much more important, scientific things he could be doing, because Steve can make coffee, that’s something he can do, while making an Infinity Stone Gauntlet is something he definitely _cannot _do.

However, Bruce is making coffee.

So Steve says: “That’s what she said, when we got back. She said the soul stone needed a sacrifice.”

“Yes, a soul for a soul,” Bruce says thoughtfully, as he roots through the cupboards looking for mugs, even though there were over twenty in the first one he opened. “That was _Kate, _though. Wasn’t it? She gave up her life. A soul for a soul.”

Steve thinks about that, as he watches Bruce, and he listens to the muted sounds from across several rooms of Tony calling Rocket a variety of rodent names, only half of which even vaguely make sense.

“But, Natasha said to get the stone, she needed to make a _sacrifice. _She and Kate – I mean, I think they were friends but. You know Natasha. She’s not close to many people. Was Kate really a _sacrifice, _for her?”

Bruce turns around.

He puts his hands on the worktop behind him, elbows bent awkwardly. His gaze, resting on Steve’s face, a thousand lightyears away. He’s big, intimidatingly big, and yet, Steve can recognise his smallness. He’s still _Bruce, _behind his largeness.

“You think –” Bruce says, and then doesn’t. “You think Kate was the soul. But Natasha still had to make a sacrifice?”

Steve swallows dryly, pressing his forearms over his chest, tucking his hands into his armpits.

Objectively, were he to categorically name one thing, one _person, _who constituted as a sacrifice for Natasha Romanov, there is only one possible response. It aches so viciously inside him, his bones shrinking and expanding, an acute, yet all-encompassing sadness.

Bruce asks: “Do you think an infinity stone is going to work in metaphors? Really?”

“I don’t know how an infinity stone works at _all, _Bruce,” Steve says, hot and truthful. Annoyed, with himself, with Bruce. “All I do know is, Natasha went to Vormir wearing her necklace. Now she’s back, without the necklace, and like you said. She’s _different.”_

Bruce has returned to his coffee-making task with greater vigour than before. A mug cracks in his grip and he drops the shards of porcelain with a strange dismissiveness, doesn’t even pause to clean it up.

“So she sacrifices Clint. But he’s already dead, so. What? Her _memory _of him? Or him? Really _him.”_

Unbidden, all but forgotten until this very instant: _They took my soul away from me. So Clint gave me a piece of his._

It was just words, just a piece of poetry within the reality of Natasha’s lifespan. She said it and she meant it. Only, that’s not how a soul works. It can’t be. If it is, Steve handed a great chunk of his own to Bucky Barnes when he was seven years old.

It’s not _real._

Not real, the way infinity stones aren’t real.

The way time travel isn’t real.

“If it was him,” Steve says, so quietly he’s not even sure Bruce can hear him over the smell of coffee and the harsh brightness of the ceiling lights. “If she really did sacrifice him – we can’t bring him back.”

A void opens up within his words, a numbness. He hadn’t, until this very moment, actually thought they’d manage it. Only now, with the possibility ripped so cruelly, so unwittingly from their grasp, does Steve finally know how much he’d believed they would do it, that they would get him back.

Should he have said something to her? Should he have told her what they wanted to do? Had she not considered the possibility already?

Would it have made a difference?

Steve doesn’t know what happened on Vormir. He doubts, now, he will ever find out.

But he can imagine. Standing in this cubby corner kitchen, he can imagine it all. The steely Natasha and the hard-eyed Kate, together. Their desperation and their resolve, the helplessness of their need. Kate, brave, angry, unforgiving, all strength in her pain, choosing the abyss of her own making over the failure of the universe.

And Natasha? Upon realising, perhaps, a life alone was not enough? Would that be enough for her to give up the share of a soul she guarded so jealously all these years?

“I’ve got an idea,” Bruce says, interrupting Steve’s hornet swarm thoughts. He looks up to see several mugs of coffee on a tray. “It’s not fool-proof, but. It will tell us something.”

For a moment, Steve waits for Bruce to tell him the plan. Then he looks at the tray, resting dainty in Bruce’s huge grip.

There are over half a dozen mugs, steam rising in curls up, disappearing with unpleasant familiarity into the air.

At the forefront, there are three for the taking.

One is a black _Stark Industries _mug. One is a cheap novelty _Avengers _mug, Steve’s pretty sure it’s the one Tony bought for Pepper from a street vendor once for five bucks, then filled it with strawberry shaped stickers for reasons nobody else knew.

The third, Steve hasn’t seen in years.

White porcelain, and written in purple glitter across the side: _The Amazing Hawkeye._

Steve bites the insides of his mouth, nodding.

“OK,” he says. “OK.”

*

There was a fragment of a moment, in 1945, when Steve Rogers clung to the side of a train.

He didn’t fall, then. Except, a piece of him did. A part of him, a fraction of his soul that he lost, that would not drown alongside him in the Arctic Ocean.

Peggy called it _the dignity of his choice._

Steve called it something else.

*

Bruce carries the tray of coffee out, distracted, shouting back at Tony as he beckons for his _Non-Rodent Science Bro._

Steve follows, pretending not to watch closely.

Bruce circuits the room naturally, which brings him conveniently to Natasha first, still standing guard from afar with cool green eyes.

He holds up the tray as an offering, and she looks briefly at the scattered mugs before reaching out to take one without a verbal response.

Steve’s blood is loud in his ears, oxygen toxic in his throat as he watches Bruce offer the tray to Scott next, who thanks him, before he reaches Steve.

Steve picks up a mug of his own, mindful not to touch the purple glitter, afraid it might rub off on his clammy fingers, might stain him forever.

He looks at Natasha’s impassive face, at her fingers interlocked over the white _Stark Industries _logo emblazoned on her mug.

When he sips, he can taste ice and ocean in the back of his throat.

*

“I am inevitable,” Thanos tells them.

Steve hears it, then, and for the rest of his life.

_Nothing is inevitable, _he rages inside his own heart, too far away to do anything but watch, helpless.

Out of the corner of his eye, Bucky Barnes, a frantic wild thing. The man he pulled out of Azzano, the man who pulled him out of the Potomac. Fighting, still, always fighting, they were born to it. Their heritage, their legacy.

Strapped to his arm beneath his elbow, a thick leather guard.

He wears it, meaningless and meaningful.

For protection. For luck.

*


End file.
